(Warning: This essay contains language which some may find offensive.)

Pussy Galore were one of the best bands of the ’80s. Their relatively compact discography of four EPs (Feel Good About Your Body, Pussy Gold 5000, Groovy Hate Fuck, SugarShit Sharp) and three studio albums (Right Now!, Dial ‘M’ For Motherfucker, Historia De La Musica Rock), plus a couple of live recordings and scattered singles, was a remarkable journey from utterly ramshackle noise to a skillfully crafted mix of punk rock, hip-hop, and industrial clatter… disguised as ramshackle noise. They were smarter than anyone gave them credit for being, and a genuinely exciting live act. (I saw them in summer 1989, on their final US tour.)

The key to the whole thing was the (creative) relationship between the two guitarist/vocalists, Jon Spencer and Julia Cafritz. They met as students at Brown University, and were both just 20 when the band formed in Washington, DC. As Spencer recalled in a 2022 interview, “I was playing in a very straight ’60s garage punk group playing bass guitar and then also at the same time playing in a totally abrasive, totally out there industrial noise group, and in that band I was playing a mixture of drums and percussion, and I was doing both things at the same time. When I finally started my own band with Pussy Galore, on a surface level it was combining those two strains.” Interestingly, that garage punk group was called Pussy Galore; Spencer took possession of the name (with its founder’s permission) at Cafritz’s urging.

(This interview with Cafritz offers a ton of detail about how the band formed and its early years.)

On the group’s first release, 1985’s Feel Good About Your Body, they were a trio: Spencer, Cafritz, and percussionist John Hammill. The EP began with a noisy punk song, “Die Bitch,” then swerved through a number of tangents: “HC Rebellion,” on which Cafritz read letters to the hardcore zine Maximumrocknroll over a repetitive guitar melody; “Constant Pain,” a minimalist guitar noise-over-metal percussion rant; and “Car Fantasy,” a crawling, doomy feedback storm over which Spencer groaned and wailed like Michael Gira of Swans.

Before leaving Washington, DC, Spencer, Cafritz, Hammill and fellow percussionist Rick Hall recorded the seven-track Groovy Hate Fuck EP, a deliberately offensive collection of short, noisy outbursts. (“You Look Like A Jew” was his dismissal of Dischord Records bands and their close-cropped hair.) There was always an element of self-subversion, though; “Cunt Tease” allows Cafritz to counter Spencer’s parodic sexual braggadocio, ending each chorus with a screamed “Fuck you!” and delivering a wrathful, dismissive tirade mid-song.

The dynamic between them, particularly onstage, was fascinating. Cafritz, by her own admission, was musically inept, but the sheer force of her personality made her vital to the entire operation, both onstage and off. As she says in the interview linked above,

“I think that in terms of the image that I projected, that was actually… fueled by something real, in terms of… a real desire, let’s put it this way, to somehow assert myself in an arena that I didn’t really feel like I belonged in. But if I was going to belong in, I wanted to do something well. Consequently, I think between the fact that I was basically just screaming rage-filled insults at men all from stage, and the fact that I was smoking four packs a day, and dressed in black, and — probably sort of the quicker person. I mean, Jon is insanely smart… but he doesn’t like to talk. And so if anybody wanted to talk, they had to talk to me. Because Jon’s very polite, but he can’t — he doesn’t really want to form sentences. (laughs)Or he didn’t back then. And so I could sort of dominate in that way.”

In summer 1986, Spencer and Cafritz moved to New York, where they made friends quickly on the CBGB scene. In Kim Gordon’s autobiography, Girl In A Band, she writes, “Julie Cafritz is one of the funniest people I know, under-acknowledged as an indie rock ‘girl’ guitar player and singer-goddess. When Julie and I first met years earlier, her band Pussy Galore had just moved to New York and was looking for a drummer. I introduced her to Bob Bert, who had just quit Sonic Youth and seemed perfect for them. Julie and her bandmate Jon Spencer were slightly scary, I remember, all black clothes with tons of ’tude.”

In addition to Bert, who, despite being a decade older than the two transplants, was ready to rock, they added two more guitarists, Neil Hagerty and Cristina Martinez. Bert’s arrival solidified the PG sound: he was a good, heavy backbeat drummer, but (at Spencer’s insistence) he replaced his snare drum with a car’s gas tank, giving their rock ’n’ roll a literal junkyard feel. Together, they came up with a brilliantly hilarious idea. As Bert recalled it in a recent interview,

“At the time, Sonic Youth was mouthing off to the press about recording their version of the Beatles’ White Album — of course, it never happened. I think we got through ‘Back in the USSR’ at a rehearsal, that was it. So when I joined Pussy Galore, Jon said to me, ‘In response to that, we should do a version of Exile On Main St. by the Stones.’ I was like, ‘Fuck yeah, it's a much better record anyway.’ We recorded that in some old school room on a beat up 8-track cassette recorder.”

Pussy Galore’s Exile On Main St. was recorded 40 years ago this month, on August 24-26, 1986. It’s a brilliant idea — a totemic album controversial in the context of its makers’ own career, revived/desecrated by a new generation — and the execution is astonishing.

If it was just a collection of raw, one-take Rolling Stones covers, it wouldn’t be very interesting at all. But Spencer’s always been an underrated musical conceptualist, and there are a whole lot of ideas at work here, manifested through very careful manipulation and assembly of sounds. Yes, the band, which again consisted of four guitarists and a drummer/junk percussionist, bash through the songs, turning the basic rock riffs into mind-warping mantras (often because the guitars were cheap, shitty and out of tune, and playing through equally cheap and shitty amps), but the recordings are extensively manipulated after the fact.

The whole thing begins with Cafritz ranting into the recorder: “Hello, I hate your fucking guts. Fuck you, I hate your fucking guts. I hate your fucking guts. I hate your fucking guts. I hate this fucking machine. I don’t know how the fuck to use it. I hate your fucking guts. I’m gonna make my own fucking music.” The first song, “Rocks Off,” begins, and you can immediately tell that Spencer and Hagerty — who are singing the vocals as one, in rough harmony, over an energetic beat from Bert — are making a serious effort at playing the song, while Cafritz (still barely able to play guitar) adds a one-note line in the middle of the music and Martinez does something similar. But when Cafritz takes the microphone on the second song, a blasting version of “Rip This Joint,” her performance is pure fire-spitting energy, matched by an atonal, clanging solo from (probably) Hagerty.

Every song on the tape is a mix of earnest effort and chaotic subversion. There’s always a steady core (usually Bert’s clattering backbeat and Spencer’s and Hagerty’s guitars), but there’s also always at least one element sliding sideways, whether it’s an unexpected burst of amp noise, a discordant sliding chord, or a rudely shouted vocal interjection. And that’s before we even talk about the post-production work done to the tapes. We hear between-song dialogue (including an enraged Spencer screaming at someone), snippets of the actual Rolling Stones, bursts of static and changing radio stations, and electronic humming from poorly aligned microphones; portions of songs are rewound and played back again; at a few points, the band is singing over the original record… also, the record has a conceptual flow. The first few songs are the most coherent and reverent to the originals, despite possessing a raucous punk energy; by “Shine A Light,” we’re in the realm of almost pure abstraction, a half-heard vocal submerged in electronic drones like something from a Throbbing Gristle live tape, and it ends with a loop of Lou Reed singing the word “Heroin” from The Velvet Underground & Nico. But the closing version of “Soul Survivor” is one of the best and most straightforward performances on the whole thing… until the tape begins to warp and slow down to half speed, looping the last chorus into a doomy groan as whooping, sirenlike sound effects and washes of static and noise take over. Finally, we’re back to Julie Cafritz screaming “I wanna fuck you!” over and over until it all ends with tape slice.

In a 1987 fanzine interview, Spencer said, “The Exile thing, to come right out and say it, is kind of a joke…” He explained the Sonic Youth/Beatles story, then added, “It’s not really a joke, and it’s not the greatest thing — parts of it kind of suck — but it’s okay. The cover’s real cool. Rick Hall, Julie’s boyfriend, did that.”

The band released Exile as a limited edition of 550 cassettes; obviously, no label would ever release such a thing. But it was instantly notorious, and raised their profile on the scene substantially. A month later, they recorded Pussy Gold 5000, a five-track EP full of short, sex-charged punk tracks (“Pretty Fuck Look,” “Spin Out,” “Get Out” and a cover of Ty Wagner & the Scotchmen’s “No Count”), plus one weird tangent — “Walk,” a hypnotically tuneless five-minute attempt at psychedelic blues, sung by Hagerty. That came out on the Hoboken-based Buy Our Records label, after which Martinez left the group.

Another guitarist, Kurt Wolf, joined, and Pussy Galore signed with Caroline, who released Right Now!, SugarShit Sharp, Dial ‘M’ For Motherfucker, all of which are masterpieces, and Historia De La Musica Rock, which is not. Cafritz quit halfway through the recording of Dial ‘M’… because Spencer had announced, in the middle of a tour, that it would be their farewell album, and Wolf quit after the 1989 tour. Historia… was recorded by the trio of Spencer, Hagerty, and Bert, and is a pretty enervated album. Spencer went on to form the Jon Spencer Blues Explosion, Hagerty focused his creative energy on Royal Trux (a band I’ve never connected with), and Bert played in Action Swingers (with Cafritz), the Chrome Cranks, and other bands. Cafritz formed the short-lived trio STP and Free Kitten, a project with Kim Gordon of Sonic Youth, Yoshimi of the Boredoms, and Mark Ibold of Pavement (and later Sonic Youth).

For years, Exile On Main St. was a legendary underground thing. You couldn’t find copies of the original cassette, but half of the tracks showed up on a bootleg LP (which I bought at the record store at CBGBs Gallery, next door to the club) and a couple of other songs were recycled on a 45. Four tracks were ultimately included on the 1992 compilation Corpse Love: The First Year.

But here’s the weird thing. Now, in the streaming era, it’s as accessible as anything else they did. More accessible, even. For years, Pussy Galore’s Caroline releases, never mind their early stuff, weren’t on Spotify or Tidal or Qobuz, presumably due to rights issues… but Exile was. In fact, if you have a Qobuz subscription, you can buy it as downloadable WAV files, and I recommend doing so. It’s a genuinely brilliant artistic gesture, and for much of its hour-long running time, it fucking rocks.

For some reason, the digital reissue of Anthony Braxton’s Composition No. 96 has been selling more copies than expected recently. This large-scale work, composed and performed in 1981 and released on LP in 1989 and CD in 1993, is a classical piece for a 37-member ensemble (including Braxton) of three flutes, two oboes, English horn, bassoon, Eb clarinet, Bb clarinet, bass clarinet, alto saxophone, French horn, two trumpets, two trombones, tuba, seven violins, four violas, three cellos, two basses, harp, and two percussionists. Braxton conducts the music, and eight people run a set of four slide projectors during the performance.

The 55-minute piece is dedicated to Karlheinz Stockhausen, and I can hear that. The way the strings wiggle and zoom, sometimes countered by blaring, almost pagan horns, with thundering tympani and other, smaller rattles and pings buried in the action, are kind of reminiscent of KS’s compositional tics. But of course it’s also possible to hear Braxton’s language(s) at work, too, and there are some fascinating transitions, like the way it shifts around the 15-minute mark from a storm surge to a long passage of harmonizing drones.

I’m a little curious why people have suddenly become interested in this piece, though. There are almost 40 Braxton albums on the Leo Records Bandcamp page, ranging from solos to duos to quartet recordings to other large orchestral works, so what’s drawn people to this one in particular? Perhaps you should check it out for yourself, and see whether it speaks to you.

If you’re a free subscriber, today’s newsletter ends here. If you’re a paying subscriber (or wish to become one), stick around for articles on shred metal, Conspicuous Despair and societal rejection, the work of Catherine Breillat, and imaginary musical instruments.

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Jim Goad is dead. He had apparently been physically ill for some time, and many would argue his brain curdled years ago. I hadn’t read his work (or listened to him; like many aging provocateurs, he had become a podcaster) in more than two decades, but my understanding is that he had long ago become nothing more than a misogynist, racist, right-wing crank.

[Disclosure: When I was a magazine editor in the early 2000s, I published three articles by Goad.]

When he first emerged in the 1990s, there was more to him than that. There was always an ugly side to his work (N.B. I have never read Answer Me!, the four-issue zine he published with his then-wife Debbie), but he sometimes asked questions that were worth asking. His 1997 book The Redneck Manifesto (subtitled America’s Scapegoats: How We Got That Way And Why We’re Not Going To Take It Anymore) is often crude and overwrought, but there’s a real consciousness at its heart. This is how he began Chapter 5, “Workin’ Hard”:

The working class doesn’t write a lot of history books. The working class doesn’t produce many movies or radio shows. The working class doesn’t tend to hire media consultants or theatrical agents. The working class has played an itty-bitty role in fashioning its popular image.

That’s because the working class was too busy working.

A page or two later, he writes, “If someone were to devise a machine that could measure hatred… I’d bet all my wooden nickels that more hatred exists between bosses and employees than between blacks and whites… Of all the hating I’ve done in my life — and I’ve done my share — ninety-nine percent of it was directed at rich white people, most of them my bosses.” Goad had a keen understanding of class in America, and did his research; there are sections of Redneck Manifesto that can be read alongside any “serious” history of labor you can name. But be warned that even the good stuff is delivered in language that you’re probably gonna hate, so if you decide the digging isn’t worth it, you’ll get no argument from me.

Goad’s life went off the rails in the late ’90s, when he was divorced from Debbie and involved with another woman, Anne Ryan. He was physically abusive toward both, and served two and a half years in prison for assaulting Ryan. When he came out, his writing grew more fevered and self-pitying; his second book was an autobiography called Shit Magnet: One Man’s Miraculous Ability to Absorb the World’s Guilt. No New York publisher would touch it, so it was released by Feral House, a small press run by journalist Adam Parfrey.

Parfrey was a few years older than Goad, and had first come to underground prominence in the late ’80s as the co-founder of Amok Press (related to but not part of Amok Books, an LA-based bookstore and mail-order source for fringe literature). The press released only eight titles, including a novel by Nazi propagandist Josef Goebbels, Jack Black’s You Can’t Win (I own a later edition from AK Press, but Amok is thanked for bringing the book to light), and Apocalypse Culture, an anthology of writings on subjects ranging from necrophilia to eugenics to extreme body modification. When the company shut down, Parfrey left Los Angeles for Washington state, where he founded Feral House and remained until his death.

Since 1989, Feral House has published hundreds of books on all sorts of subjects related to history, politics, and pop culture. Some of their best-known titles are Michael Moynihan and Didrik Søderlind’s Lords Of Chaos: The Bloody Rise of the Satanic Metal Underground, Rudolph Grey’s Nightmare Of Ecstasy: The Life and Art of Edward D. Wood, Jr., Jerry Stahl’s Permanent Midnight, Steven Blush’s American Hardcore: A Tribal History, and Parfrey and Cletus Nelson’s Citizen Keane: The Big Lies Behind the Big Eyes. All of these inspired, or were adapted into, movies.

Other Feral House titles that I have read and enjoyed over the years have included Ika Johannesson & Jon Jefferson Klingberg’s Blood Fire Death: The Swedish Metal Story (reviewed here), Michael Tau’s Extreme Music: Silence to Noise and Everything In Between (reviewed here), Mel Gordon’s Voluptuous Panic: The Erotic World of Weimar Berlin, It’s A Man’s World: Men’s Adventure Magazines, The Postwar Pulps (edited by Parfrey, and reviewed here), and Timothy Wyllie’s Love Sex Fear Death: The Inside Story of The Process Church of the Final Judgment (discussed here).

Parfrey died in 2018, but Feral House continues under the guidance of Christina Ward. This summer, they published Apocalypse Omnibus: The Adam Parfrey Reader, a thick collection of his journalism, quotes from interviews (blended together into one mega-interview; it’s a good idea that works pretty well), scans of letters Parfrey received from people like Charles Manson, Ted Kaczynski, and John Wayne Gacy, posts from a blog on the Feral House website, and more. (Buy it from Amazon.)

The book is very much a mixed bag. Some of the more traditionally journalistic pieces, including several investigative/immersive features on fringe religious organizations originally published in the San Diego Reader in the early ’90s and later reprinted in Parfrey’s book Cult Rapture, are fascinating and well-crafted. Others, like a story on a physically handicapped couple who formed a small sex-positive group, exhibit a sneering cruelty that’s more than a little off-putting.

There’s an interesting kind of revisionism at work in Apocalypse Omnibus, especially in the section Fascists, White Supremacists, And Their Friends. It includes an interview with a skinhead, an article on SWAT police, a long story about “soldier of fortune” and right-wing activist Bo Gritz, as well as the introduction Parfrey wrote to the Goebbels novel mentioned above. But perusing this section of the book (which is one-fifth as long as the collection of excerpts from his grumpy, misanthropic “HelL.A.” newspaper columns) will not tell you anything about, for example, Parfrey’s decades of friendship and collaboration with fascist artists Boyd Rice and Michael Moynihan, nor about his correspondence with neo-Nazi writer James Mason.

In the introduction to his book Rants And Incendiary Tracts, Parfrey wrote, “To hold an opinion and dare to express it is the final prerogative of the free man. Announcing an incendiary truth may be the last remaining vestige of human dignity.” In the introduction to this book, Christina Ward writes, “Adam Parfrey understood that the only durable response to challenging ideas is to bring them into the open and examine them without illusion.”

In the same introduction, she provides an explanation of his methods that in 2026 reads to this veteran journalist like ass-covering:

Parfrey did not approach his subjects as a journalist seeking balance or as an academic maintaining distance. He approached them as a collector of evidence, which required access to people and networks that do not open themselves to declared opposition. Access was obtained through building relationships, patience, and, at times, strategic accommodation. He listened without interruption, allowed subjects to speak in their own terms, and, when necessary, reflected their language back to them to gain trust. [emphasis mine]

So when Parfrey espoused personally racist views in letters to James Mason, it was just his way of cultivating a source? What about when he became friends with Holocaust denier Keith Stimely, or when he, Rice, Moynihan, and Nikolas Schreck formed the Abraxas Foundation? Same deal, I guess. You never know when relationships will yield a good story, right? It’s just kinda funny that he never wrote about, say, the Black Hebrew Israelites for Cult Rapture. I guess it might have been too difficult for him to reflect their language back to them to gain trust.

People under 50 have no idea what “the underground” was like in the 1980s and even the 1990s. The amount of misogyny, homophobia, and racism that passed under the aegis of “fearless investigation of humanity’s dark side” would, in 2026, send most people screaming out of the room. Apocalypse Omnibus is a time capsule from that era. The sneering, “look at these freaks” attitude of the cult section; the “isn’t this fascinating?” ingenuousness of the profiles of Nazis; the bilious, eye-bulging hatred in a piece on confrontational feminist and anti-porn crusader Andrea Dworkin: it’s all very familiar to me. Even the prose, overheated and wrathful, is very, very ’80s; you could put these pieces right next to anything from back then by Steve Albini (who regretted, and apologized for, his edgelord years before his death) or Lydia Lunch (who never apologizes for anything).

A lot of people, in the old days, would claim that it was OK to use racist, sexist, homophobic, and ableist language because they didn’t actually hold those views and didn’t know anybody who did, so it was understood in their circles to be all in good fun. Or they’d argue that when you were exploring the dark side of American culture, you had to expect to get a little bit on you. I don’t know what Adam Parfrey actually believed. His writings are deliberately opaque in that regard. He operates as a mouthpiece for his subjects. Which is fine. But his choice of subjects — the people he thought were worth handing a megaphone to — provide some clues.

I’m glad Feral House exists. Their catalog is wide-ranging, full of valuable and informative books. But the world has no more need of edgelords. The age of material and political comfort that allowed (white) “underground” culture to spend its time being “provocative” has passed. We live in an America governed by a senile criminal and his fascist goons, where cities are subject to military assault and citizens are swept up in racist purges, where women’s rights — not just the right not to have children, but the right to vote — are under direct threat, and trans people are being legislated out of existence. In this America, Adam Parfrey’s work has some historical value, but the attitudes underpinning it are a different story. His decades of playing footsie with neo-Nazis and serial killers, occasionally winking at the reader to let us know it’s all fine, we’re just turning over rocks to watch the bugs scatter, don’t feel so much like a warning (the back cover copy to Apocalypse Omnibus begins, “Adam Parfrey saw it coming”) as like a relic: something you find on a dusty shelf in the garage and ask, Why are we still keeping this around?

Guess what? It’s Bandcamp Friday, the day on which that site forgoes its usual share of sales revenue and passes all monies directly to artists and labels, and we’ve got a bunch of records for you to check out!

On September 25, we’ll be releasing Constellations and Hemispheres, the latest studio album from the legendary Wadada Leo Smith (I know, I can’t believe it either). It features tracks by four different ensembles: a trio with pianist Sylvie Courvoisier and drummer Marcus Gilmore; and a quintet, sextet and octet including, in various combinations, vibraphonist Bobby Naughton, electric guitarist Lamar Smith, bassists Melvin Gibbs and Bill Laswell, percussionists Mauro Refosco and Brian Jawara Gray, and drummer Pheeroan akLaff. CDs are en route from the printer, so pre-order now!

Also on September 25, we’ll be releasing In This Desert, the sixth album by trumpeter Michael Sarian and his quartet with keyboardist Santiago Liebson, bassist Marty Kenney, and drummer Nathan Ellman-Bell. It’s Sarian’s (and our) first-ever double CD, a beautiful collection of psychedelic electric jazz that blurs the line between ’70s Miles and ’90s trip-hop. (Sarian’s last album included a version of Portishead’s “Glory Box,” so you know I’m not off base with this comparison.) Again, CDs are in production, so pre-order now!

These are our last two releases of 2026, but it’s been a hell of a year. We started out in May with these two titles:

Joel Futterman and William Parker’s Transcendent Universe is a rapturous hour of free jazz piano-bass action that’ll leave your head swimming. Get it here.

Ava Mendoza’s Alive Alone, Alive Together is a ripping, shredding live album that features legendary drummer Hamid Drake on four of its eight tracks and sounds better the louder you play it. Get it here.

Then, in July, we unleashed:

Cecil Taylor Orchestra Humane, At Iridium 2004: a massive digital archive of 14 complete performances by this 15-member big band, recorded the week of his 75th birthday. Taylor’s mid ’00s orchestras manifested his artistic vision in a way none of his other ensembles did, and that music has never been available like this before. It’s a must-hear for any Taylor fan. Get it here. (And if $75 for the whole set seems like too much, you can buy any one of the 14 sets by itself, as a taster.)

We also handle the legendary UK avant-garde label Leo Records’ Bandcamp presence, and 19 new titles have just gone up there. They include titles led by or featuring artists like pianist John Wolf Brennan; bassist William Parker; reeds players Carlo Actis Dato, Frank Gratkowski, Wally Shoup, and Gebhard Ullmann; pianists Alexander von Schlippenbach and Aki Takase (joined by their son, DJ Illvibe); and more. There are well over 400 titles on the Leo Records Bandcamp page now, with more coming every month. Dive in!

Author, trumpeter, and Burning Ambulance Music artist Nate Wooley has written a superb essay on the late Sonny Rollins for N+1. Read it. “Rollins’s defining feature as a musician and a man was his attitude. A liberating feeling of I don’t give a fuck charged everything he did. From his tendency to disappear at the peaks of his career to his showing up to the Village Gate sessions in a bespoke suit and a mohawk haircut, Rollins played what he wanted, how he wanted, when he wanted. That might mean reinventing a Bing Crosby novelty tune as a tenor-sax juggernaut, as on ‘I’m an Old Cowhand (from the Rio Grande),’ from Way Out West (1957). Or it might mean pushing the limits of a minimal melody like ‘East Broadway Run Down’ until the band is audibly uncomfortable. But Rollins wasn’t trying merely to provoke. He was chasing the music in his head, being true to his ‘voice’ — a practice all jazz musicians strive for, but which few of us are committed or brave enough to lay down on record.”

Paying subscribers: stick around for thoughts on the latest book from Colson Whitehead.

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It’s time for one of our monthly roundups of excellent new(ish) music. This time, we’ve got a set of clarinet-piano duos; a solo piano disc; some technical death metal from a veteran crew; some heavy, arty psychedelic rock; and an unearthed 1970s live album. Let’s dive in!

I’ve been a fan of the heavy psychedelic rock band Elder for almost a decade; I came on board, like many others, with their fourth album, 2017’s Reflections Of A Floating World. They’re currently based in Berlin, but got their start in Boston, and they have some qualities in common with another band from that city, Isis. Elder frontman Nick DiSalvo’s voice sounds a little like former Isis frontman Aaron Turner’s, at least when the latter is singing rather than roaring, and both groups favor long songs and patient rock-tumbler rhythms. But where Isis plumbed the ocean’s depths, Elder is much more interested in soaring skyward.

Through Zero, their seventh and longest album, was released at the end of May, and it took me a while to get around to it. When I finally did, I was blown away. The songs are quite long; five of the six run between eight and 11 minutes, which makes the six-minute final track, “Blighted Age,” feel like a tacked-on coda, and they combine a bunch of elements, all from the transcendent side of rock. “Capture & Release” has dreamlike AOR-prog synths, a motorik beat that eventually explodes, big anthemic riffs and howled vocals, and I’m sure the lyrics are about big life stuff, in a post-Ronnie James Dio sort of way, but I don’t pay attention to lyrics. I’m mostly interested in the way the music surges and recedes, and surges again, like ocean waves. Elder aren’t unique; there are other bands doing similar work. I would put their albums on the same shelf as Baroness, Kylesa and Mastodon (particularly Mastodon’s more hard-rock-oriented discs like Emperor Of Sand and Once More ’Round The Sun), and I hear a lot of commonalities between Through Zero and Fantasia, the latest album by French cosmic stoner trio Slift. Weirdly, the two records came out only a week apart. (Elder’s is better.)

Psycroptic is another band I’ve been aware of for a long time. The first album of theirs I heard was 2006’s Symbols Of Failure, which was a very good technical death metal record with the same level of complexity and punch as Decapitated’s Nihility or Cryptopsy’s Once Was Not. I stuck with them through their next release, 2008’s (Ob)servant, but they took four years to make another album and I had moved on. I hadn’t thought about them in years until their ninth album, The Pulse Of Annihilation, landed in my inbox. And no, I haven’t listened to any of the albums in between since getting this one, so these are only my thoughts on where Psycroptic are in 2026. The Pulse Of Annihilation is a catchier, more rifftastic album than Symbols Of Failure or (Ob)servant. It’s still very much death metal, but I would recommend it to fans of face-punching, aggro but still hooky (by death metal standards) bands like The Black Dahlia Murder or Misery Index. The vocals are clearer, less gurgling and guttural and more indebted to the furious ranting of modern hardcore. They give you a break every once in a while — “Our Pillars Fall” begins with a long moody passage before the riffs resume — but generally this is a high-energy, cathartically assaultive album.

Clarinetist Sayyod Mirzomurodov and pianist Mariya Akhadjanova have recorded an album of Contemporary Uzbek Music For Clarinet And Piano that’s called exactly that. (Classical artists need to come up with more exciting titles.) It consists of world premiere recordings of pieces by Farrukh Akramov, Mustafo Bafoyev, Anyar Ergashev, Nurali Erkaev, Habibulla Rahimov, and Sherzod Sobirov, none of whom I’ve ever heard of. (Mirzomurodov emailed me this album, and I was intrigued enough to give it a listen.) The instrumentation places a lot of limitations on the composers, so these are pieces that feature strong up-front melodies played on clarinet, with mostly delicate, romantic countermelodies from the piano. The other option would be heavy, clanging chords beneath shrill mathematical exercises from the reed, but I guess — based strictly on this evidence — there’s not a whole lot of atonality and/or dissonance in Uzbek music. Everything here is very pretty, and played with the precision and bright-eyed energy of the studied virtuoso. Four of the nine pieces are by Bafoyev; the other composers get one each. I wish I could hear Bafoyev’s 22-minute Sonata For Clarinet And Orchestra in the fullness of its grandeur, but even as a stripped-down duo piece, it’s quite nice. (The only place I’ve been able to find a physical copy of this album for sale is via the label, Samek Music; they’re based in the UK.)

Can instrumental music have polemical value? Composer Frederic Rzewski certainly thought so, and so does Colorado-based pianist Walton Lott, it seems. He performs Rzewski’s Four Pieces For Piano on his new album Impulses, alongside John Harbison’s Piano Sonata No. 2. In the liner notes, Lott writes, “Rzewski shows us that music can take on an observational role, shaping political topics into forms mimetic to the often inhumane aspects of our society.” I… guess? I don’t know. My favorite example of music being, in Dewey Redman’s phrase, in the ear of the behearer is Charles Mingus’s “Remember Rockefeller At Attica” — a title like that makes you expect roaring, Archie Shepp-esque protest jazz, but the actual piece sounds like the theme to a late night talk show. Anyway, Lott’s performance of Rzewski’s piece is quite beautiful, in an intense way, and the Harbison piece matches its energy quite well, while also feeling more conventionally romantic (whether with a lower- or upper-case R).

I grew up hearing one or two songs on the radio (“Roundabout” on the classic rock station, “Owner of a Lonely Heart” on the top 40 station), but the first full Yes album I heard, in the early 2000s, was the remastered two-CD version of their 1973 triple live victory lap, Yessongs. And while I’ve now heard all their Atlantic albums and most of the ones afterward, and I have a deep love for their golden-era studio recordings (Fragile, Close To The Edge, Tales From Topographic Oceans, Relayer and Going For The One), Yes’s live releases — Yessongs, 1980’s Yesshows, and the 2015 box Progeny: Seven Shows From Seventy-Two — have always been my favorite items in their catalog, because all the precision and shine of the studio work goes out the window and they become an ass-kicking rock band jamming out these songs with breakneck energy and anarchic zeal.

Live At Roosevelt Stadium, Jersey City, NJ July 17, 1976 is exactly what its title claims: a complete concert from 50 years ago by vocalist Jon Anderson, guitarist Steve Howe, keyboardist Patrick Moraz, bassist Chris Squire, and drummer Alan White. The show was broadcast on WNEW-FM (a station I grew up listening to), and has been bootlegged a million times over the years, but this is its first official release. I have no idea what source Rhino used for their version, but the mix is kinda rough, very focused on Anderson’s vocals and Moraz’s synths, and there are some passages of distortion and heavy tape hiss, especially during the version of “The Story Of I,” from Moraz’s solo album of the same name. (The concert also includes an excerpt from Anderson’s solo album Olias Of Sunhillow.) That said, it’s a really enjoyable document of Yes at their wooliest. Nearly two hours long, it includes versions of two of Relayer’s three tracks, “The Gates Of Delirium” and “Sound Chaser,” and a more than 26-minute version of “Ritual (Nous Sommes Du Soleil)” from Tales From Topographic Oceans. Plus, of course, classics like “Siberian Khatru,” “Long Distance Runaround,” “Heart Of The Sunrise” and more. If you’re as big a fan of Yes the ass-kicking rock band as I am, it’s a must-hear. Especially if, like me, you somehow neglected to ever see them while Chris Squire was alive. Get it from Amazon.

We’re releasing two new albums September 25!

Wadada Leo Smith’s Constellations And Hemispheres features four different ensembles, collectively including pianist Sylvie Courvoisier, vibraphonist Bobby Naughton, guitarist Lamar Smith, bassists Bill Laswell and Melvin Gibbs, drummers Marcus Gilmore; and Pheeroan akLaff, and percussionists Brian Jarawa Gray and Mauro Refosco. It’s a stunningly beautiful record, kind of a cousin to his 2023 digital-only release Fire Illuminations, but totally its own thing. You’re gonna love it.

Michael Sarian’s In This Desert (our first double CD!) is the fifth album by his long-running quartet with keyboardist Santiago Liebson, bassist Marty Kenney, and drummer Nathan Ellman-Bell. When I first heard it, I thought, This is like the exact middle ground between ’70s Miles and ’90s Ninja Tune/Mo’Wax. You’re gonna love this one, too.

As always, these are strictly limited editions of just 500 copies each, so pre-order your copies now!

I discovered pianist Darrell Grant this year, while rooting around on the Criss Cross Jazz label’s Bandcamp page.

Criss Cross is a Dutch label founded by Gerry Teekens in 1981. He ran it until his death in 2019, releasing over 400 albums in that time. The label continues, with his son Jerry Teekens Jr. in charge; they’ve put out two dozen titles since their founder’s passing. But I’ve been digging around in their back catalog lately, picking up albums released in the mid to late ’90s by up-and-coming New York players, tasked with delivering takes on straightahead jazz that always included standards, ballads and blues alongside new compositions in old styles.

On my most recent journey into Criss Cross-land, I bought a couple of early albums by saxophonists Chris Potter and Don Braden, two by drummer Billy Drummond (one of which, 1996’s Dubai, was the first release I ever heard from the label), and two by Grant. I had never heard of him, but his releases seemed interesting, and the personnel on each was promising. (He also played on After Dark, one of the Don Braden albums I bought.) It turned out to be a well-placed bet.

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Before last week, I hadn’t attended a live music performance since I saw the Vijay Iyer Trio with Linda May Han Oh and Tyshawn Sorey, at the Jazz Standard (RIP) in New York in February 2020. I had plans to see Chief Adjuah (then still Christian Scott) at the Blue Note in March 2020, but venues were already reducing capacity, and I emailed the publicist and told him that I would not be coming. (Those Blue Note gigs were recorded for the live album Axiom. You should check that out.)

I did not go out to see any bands in 2020, 2021 or 2022, and in 2023, I moved to deep northwest Montana, where almost nobody tours. (There have been a couple of interesting jazz shows here — Branford Marsalis’s quartet came through, and Joshua Redman’s group — but I wasn’t able to make it to either one.)

Well, I finally made it back out into the world of live music this past Friday, when I drove just under 100 miles each way to attend Fire In The Mountains, an outdoor heavy music festival held at Red Eagle Campground in East Glacier Park, Montana, on the Blackfeet Reservation.

Fire In The Mountains is a four-day event that features some genuinely amazing, one-off performances. This year the lineup included exclusive appearances by Neurosis, 16 Horsepower, Borknagar, Full Of Hell, Subrosa, The Ruins Of Beverast, Gallowbraid (making their US live debut), and Abbath, Ice Dale and Armagedda performing their album Between Two Worlds (released as I in 2006), as well as Enslaved, Agalloch, Baroness, Sigh, Old Man Gloom, Yaotl Mictlan, Galvanist (a Montana band I wrote about here) and more.

I couldn’t attend the whole event (I had other stuff going on, and I don’t camp), so I chose to go on Friday because I wanted to see Baroness. I’ve been a fan since their full-length debut, 2007’s Red Album, but had never seen them live. I was also excited to see Yaotl Mictlan, a band from Salt Lake City that plays black metal inspired by Mesoamerican mythology and the Zapatista movement in Mexico.

They were the first band onstage at three in the afternoon, but they drew a sizable crowd. Their eight-song set featured a heavy, pounding tribal beat and indigenous instruments — rattles and flutes — and the guitars were sometimes a fuzzy black metal shriek, but doomy and psychedelic at other times. What sets Fire In The Mountains apart from other metal events was instantly visible in the pit, which was not a crowd of young men banging into and bouncing off each other, at least not entirely. For much of the set it was a circular dance, like a metal powwow, and indeed, before their last song, YM vocalist Tlatecatl said, “Feel free to dance on this next one, fellas,” and people did.

The Native nature of the event is impossible to miss. It’s organized in collaboration with the Firekeeper Alliance, a nonprofit focused on suicide prevention and mental health awareness within the Blackfeet community. One of its founders, Charlie Speicher, also teaches at Buffalo Hide Academy, an alternative school in Browning, encouraging the students to express themselves through a love of heavy music.

(After reading that article last year, I sent a package of Burning Ambulance CDs to the students there.)

Firekeeper Alliance had a booth offering a student-created zine and information about their work, and other Native health organizations were also present on site. The entire festival was alcohol-free, and I barely saw or smelled anyone smoking, tobacco or otherwise (Montana has legal weed).

The first day began with traditional dances and ceremony, and bands from Buffalo Hide Academy performed. There were workshops and panel discussions throughout the weekend in addition to the music. There were Native vendors offering food, art, and other things. The women who drove the shuttle buses from downtown East Glacier to the festival grounds and back were Native, and so were many if not most of the other event staff. But perhaps most importantly, there were Native people there to watch the bands and enjoy the festival. And maybe it was because it was held on the reservation, or because heavy music is multi-generational now, but I saw a lot of families with kids, kids playing in the dirt during bands’ sets, kids hanging out in the woods and skipping rocks into the lake, and groups of teenagers walking around. When I went to metal shows in the past (and this may just have been the shows I was going to), my impression was of a bunch of aging (mostly white) dudes gathered to watch other aging dudes play the old songs. This was not that. And even though some people had traveled great distances to be at Fire In The Mountains (I spoke with two guys who’d come — separately — from Australia, and another from London), many others were local, and it reminded me that Montana is less white than people may think.

(A side point: The quantity and variety of tattoos, piercings, etc. I saw were astonishing, and fuels something I’ve been thinking about for several years. I have been witnessing what I can only read as a major societal transformation over the past decade-plus, of which the rise in facial tattoos and back-of-the-hand tattoos are an inescapable signal. See, when I was young, the phrase was, “Don’t get any tattoos where the judge can see them.” Nothing on your face, nothing a long-sleeve shirt won’t hide. But now, face tattoos have been normalized by musicians and their fans, and I keep reading it as a rejection of societal standards fueled, at least in part, by a perceived lack of economic opportunity. How can you say to someone, as you once might have done, “You’ll never get a good job looking like that” when the simple truth is, there are no good jobs to be had? I believe the rise in elaborate tattooing is not just tribal unity but a way of saying, “Fuck it — your [societal] game is rigged, and I’m opting out.”)

The second band I watched was Wayfarer, a group from Colorado. They, too, had black metal at the root of their sound — their first song was a harsh, primitive blast — but added a lot of atmospheric elements drawn from blues and country. Most of their other songs featured steel guitar sounds and proggy keyboards. They premiered a new song — “Hollow Hearts On The Trail To Eden” — which they said had been written with David Eugene Edwards of 16 Horsepower, and announced that they’d have a new album soon, their first since 2023. At the end of their set, they brought a bunch of Blackfeet kids from Buffalo Hide Academy onstage, one of whom shouted, “Suicide is never an option!” and got the crowd to repeat it back.

I had been hoping to see Raven Chacon (a Diné artist from Arizona who won the Pulitzer Prize for Music in 2022) performing in duo with former Sepultura drummer Iggor Cavalera, but their travel to the festival was delayed, and their set was moved to Saturday. So after a meal break, I found a spot to watch Baroness.

Originally from Savannah, Georgia, Baroness have been one of my favorite bands since I first heard them. Their music started out as arty, sludgy psychedelic doom; they were part of a small school of 2000s Southern bands that also included Mastodon, Kylesa, Red Fang and others, but bandleader John Baizley always seemed more interested in soaring than headbanging. Their third album, 2012’s Yellow & Green, should have been their breakthrough to the big time, but instead they were nearly destroyed by a horrifying bus accident that took several years to recover from. By the time their next album, 2015’s Purple, came out, they’d lost two key members. But their current lineup, with lead guitarist Gina Gleason, bassist Nick Jost, and drummer Sebastian Thomson, feels like the best version of the band yet. The two albums they’ve made together, 2019’s Gold & Grey and 2023’s Stone, feature some of their most anthemic songs, and Gleason’s harmony vocals balance Baizley’s gruff roar beautifully.

Their set was extremely bass-heavy; in fact, I had originally been standing toward the back of the crowd, but the bass became so overwhelming that I retreated to a grassy slope and sat down to watch the rest. But the songs were great, and the band was obviously excited to be there. That was a very common sentiment all day long, from artists and attendees alike. A big part of the Fire In The Mountains experience is the sheer natural beauty of the location. Early in the afternoon, I took a walk through the woods, away from the stage, and squatted by the shore of the nearby lake so I could stick my hands in the water. The mountains rose all around us, and the sun was high in the sky until nearly nine PM.

By the time the sun did begin to set, I was ready to embark on the nearly two-hour drive home. I was fried from the sun, and I wasn’t that interested in seeing the headlining acts, Agalloch and 16 Horsepower.

Even that drive to and from the site was beautiful. I have learned that going pretty much anywhere in Montana requires highway driving. In this case, my journey was 15 miles on one highway, 10 miles on a second, and 70 miles on a third, the latter of which took me all the way through Glacier National Park. And when I say “highway,” what I mean is a curving two-lane road on which vehicles are traveling at 70-80 miles an hour, with gigantic mountains covered in 60-foot trees on one side and a steep slope down to a river on the other side. Making the trip in the daytime was fantastic; coming back home in the dark was a little more nerve-wracking, but the site of a gigantic orange moon above the trees was strangely calming.

I’m really glad Fire In The Mountains exists. Its unique qualities (the location, the people behind it, the one-off performances they’re booking) are getting it a lot of attention from the music press, and I hope that’s going to translate into material benefit for the Blackfeet Nation. I hope there will also be a knock-on effect whereby booking agents will realize that there’s an audience for this type of music in this corner of Montana, and get bands to play Kalispell instead of just Missoula or Billings. Will I be back next year? I don’t know; I’m gonna be 55 in December, and the “I’m too old for this shit” feeling is strong within me. But as my first experience with live music in more than six years, it was a hell of a thing.

This week I read Blow By Blow: The Jeff Beck Story, by Brad Tolinski and Chris Gill.

I am not a huge Beck fan. (I do like Jeff Beck significantly more than Beck, for whatever that’s worth.) Truth is a pretty good heavy blues-rock record with Rod Stewart on vocals — just make sure you listen to the mono mix (you can find it on YouTube); Blow By Blow and Wired have their moments; and I like the short-lived power trio Beck, Bogert & Appice more than I probably should. But to get much out of this book, you pretty much have to be an obsessive fanboy, with the emphasis on “boy.”

The problems with the book are many, beginning with its subject. Jeff Beck was a British rock guitarist, born in 1944 and part of the immediate post-Beatles wave of players that also included Eric Clapton and Jimmy Page. (All three were members of the Yardbirds: Clapton first, then Beck, then Page, with the latter two overlapping.) He attempted a solo career in the late 1960s and into the 1970s, with intermittent success. But he was mercurial and self-critical to the point of professional self-sabotage. The number of cancelled tours, abandoned albums, and fractured personal and professional relationships in this book is astonishing. By the end I had lost count of how many sentences began with “Unfortunately.”

Because Beck’s career consisted of a decade and a half of relatively constant activity, followed by four decades of more intermittent activity, the book is necessarily front-loaded. Its first 215 pages take the reader from a 13-year-old Beck discovering rock ’n’ roll via the movie The Girl Can’t Help It to the recording of Blow By Blow, his fifth solo album and commercial breakthrough. The 13 albums that followed get approximately 130 pages. I was reminded of Paul Steinbeck’s Message To Our Folks, a collective biography of the Art Ensemble Of Chicago that devoted its entire first half to the members’ childhoods and education, the group’s formation and their two-year sojourn to Paris, then hopped and skipped through everything from 1971 to the present day.

The prose is unimaginative, written in the bland style of music magazine profiles, and at times, the obstinate focus on music (and particularly gear) rather than Jeff Beck the apparently quite flawed human being can be darkly hilarious. The following two-sentence paragraph is reproduced verbatim:

Before heading to the United States for the ARMS tour, he ended his fifteen-year relationship with Celia Hammond and took up with Julia Smith, who was just eighteen years old and twenty-one years his junior. He also set aside his beloved Stratocaster in favor of a de rigueur hot-rodded Jackson Soloist super Strat with a flashy pink finish, high-output Seymour Duncan pickups, and double-locking Kahler vibrato.

Ultimately, Beck’s unpleasant personality provides the book’s narrative through-line. It’s amazing how many times the authors tell a story that goes like this: Beck has an idea. He gathers the musicians he wants, embarks on the project/makes the record, then goes on tour to support it. Halfway through, he cancels the tour and immediately shit-talks the band and the album to the press. Rinse and repeat. And those are just the cases where the record actually gets completed. There are just as many stories of abortive sessions where a few tracks were recorded before Beck disappears in a fit of pique.

If you’re enough of a Jeff Beck fan to need what amounts to a narrativized sessionography (plus an appendix breaking down many of his best-known guitars), this book may be for you. It was not for me.

If you’re a free subscriber, today’s newsletter ends here. If you’re a paying subscriber, stick around for links to a few articles I’ve published recently, and several interesting articles on language in literature, 21st century art movements, and more.

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Ornette Coleman was always around, but in the late ’80s and early ’90s, his appearances became less frequent, and thus carried an element of surprise. Virgin Beauty, his 1988 album with Prime Time, got a big PR boost from the fact that Grateful Dead guitarist Jerry Garcia played on three tracks. I think the first time I ever saw Coleman’s name in print was a Rolling Stone review of that album. In 1991, he worked with composer Howard Shore on the soundtrack to David Cronenberg’s Naked Lunch (it’s amazing, and a perfect companion to the film; buy it if you’ve never heard it). In 1993, he performed with the Dead.

But then, in the middle of the decade, there was a sudden flurry of activity. First, he received a MacArthur Fellowship in 1994, which allowed him to start his own label, Harmolodic Records, and sign a distribution deal with Verve/Polygram. Under that arrangement, he released Tone Dialing, the first Prime Time album since Virgin Beauty and one that featured a new lineup of the group, including two keyboard players. The following year, Coleman released two albums simultaneously, with a new acoustic band that included a piano player, for the first time since he’d recorded with Paul Bley in 1958.

Sound Museum: Hidden Man and Sound Museum: Three Women, released 30 years ago this month, featured Geri Allen on piano, Charnett Moffett on bass, and Denardo Coleman on drums. Each album contained 14 tracks, 13 of which were versions of the same compositions and one of which was unique (Hidden Man’s exclusive track was a version of the spiritual “What A Friend We Have In Jesus”; Three Women’s was “Don’t You Know By Now”). They even had almost the same running order: the first six tracks and the last two were the same on each disc. Many of the compositions — “What Reason Could I Give,” “European Echoes,” “Mob Job,” “Mothers Of The Veil,” “Home Grown,” “City Living,” “Yesterday, Today And Tomorrow” and “Biosphere” — were ones he had recorded before, in some cases dating back to the early ’60s. The biggest difference between the two albums was that “Don’t You Know By Now,” the exclusive track on Three Women, was an atmospheric, reverb-soaked R&B ballad featuring vocals by Chris Walker and Lauren Kinhan.

That said, each version of the 13 tunes that the two albums have in common is different from its counterpart, often significantly so. To pick one example, the take of “Biosphere” on Hidden Man is a three-minute flurry, with Ornette clearly leading the music, Denardo battering his kit, and Allen and Moffett filling in the middle, while the one on Three Women is more than a minute longer and begins with a bass solo, followed by a solo piano passage, and when Ornette and Denardo come in they’re both playing much more lightly and airily.

Geri Allen’s approach to the music varies more from track to track than anyone else’s. The two versions of “City Living” are particular standouts to me. They’re both fast, high-intensity pieces with Denardo all over the kit, but as always, there are differences. On Hidden Man, Moffett briefly picks up the bow in a passage that sounds touched by post-production, while on Three Women, the rhythm is a little less intense, with an almost Latin feel. But Allen’s playing on both tracks is what draws my ear. The way she sweeps across the keyboard, then pounds a two- or three-note figure over and over again, then launches another full-spectrum assault, is like an overt homage to Cecil Taylor. It’s a more extreme version of what she did on “Vertical Flowing,” a duo with Ornette that she recorded for her 1997 Blue Note album Eyes… In The Back Of Your Head:

(Taylor and Coleman were friends for decades, and even rehearsed together at one point in the 1980s, but never recorded or performed together, so these Geri Allen sessions are the closest we’ll ever get to knowing what that might have sounded like.)

The two versions of “P.P. (Picolo Pesos)” are another example of the stark variations the quartet was able to ring on the same tune. The Hidden Man take is a speedy, typically Ornette-ish piece with a vamping sax line and a hard-swinging rhythm; Allen’s piano mostly offers trills as the bass and drums jump off. The Three Women version, though, foregrounds the piano and the whole thing has a jumpy, high-energy, almost Caribbean feel that I love.

Allen told Ted Panken in a JazzTimes interview, “Playing with Ornette shifted my conception of the piano. The sound was more important than the notes, though technical prowess was important, too. It’s very much like your first try at double dutch — what not to do, how not to reduce what’s there, but contribute something to help propel the music.”

In a later conversation with fellow pianist Renee Rosnes, also for JazzTimes, Allen said, “When I came into the band, it was a well-developed trio without the piano. So it was more about me finding a space in something that was already complete. At least, it felt complete to me. So he would give me this music and I would hear how he would play. I would hear the velocity and the virtuosity in the approach and the fact that everyone was playing to their full capacity — going for it. So I learned from the combination of hearing him describe the kinds of things that he liked and the kinds of things that maybe were reducing a moment… him articulating the things that were working or not working for him.”

She added, “To hear Ornette’s sound next to you — the impact of what that is, and the sound in and of itself — just the weight of that really made me want to figure out how you develop that when you play a note as a pianist. We have to find a way to do that. It doesn’t feel like a piano anymore, it doesn’t feel like a particular instrument, it’s something more. I think Ornette was looking for that from me: to find that place where it wasn’t really a piano, or it didn’t matter what the instrument was.”

And indeed, what’s interesting about what Allen does throughout the Sound Museum albums is that she really isn’t playing the role of a “jazz pianist.” That’s partly because Ornette Coleman’s compositions don’t lend themselves to that approach. Chords are often beside the point — he relies on melody and rhythm for his structure, so a pianist could get by with just their right hand and fit in perfectly well. Thus, on these records, Allen often plays chords as rhythmic elements rather than harmonic-structural elements. It’s a James Brown-esque “everything is a drum” approach, though the music is not funk-based.

The production on the Sound Museum albums is also a surprise. Ornette’s saxophone is clean and just slightly augmented with reverb; Allen’s piano sounds beautiful; Moffett’s bass is woody and fully present at all times; and/but Denardo Coleman’s kit sounds absolutely huge, surprisingly dry, and is mixed like he’s playing on a rock record. Taken all together, it sounds like no other jazz album I can think of, but it’s also not weirdly garish like 1987’s In All Languages (a double LP that featured Prime Time and his reunited 1959 quartet playing the same set of pieces) or some of Coleman’s other studio releases.

Now for the bad news. Sound Museum: Hidden Man and Sound Museum: Three Women are not easy to find these days. Coleman’s deal to distribute Harmolodic through Verve yielded four albums of new material — Tone Dialing, these two, and Colors: Live In Leipzig, a duo with pianist Joachim Kühn — and reissues of the Prime Time album Body Meta, In All Languages, and his duo album with bassist Charlie Haden, Soapsuds, Soapsuds. But of all that material, only Colors is currently available on streaming services, and none of it remains in print on CD. So if you want to hear these two excellent records, you’re gonna have to either listen on YouTube, or dig them up on Discogs or eBay. But trust me, you’ll be glad you did.

Burning Ambulance is a 100% independent, reader- and listener-supported enterprise. We have always been funded through record sales and newsletter subscriptions. But in 2026, we were granted 501(c)(3) status and are now a tax-exempt nonprofit, so we are launching our first-ever fundraising drive in order to support our operations through this year and beyond.

So far this year, we’ve already released three amazing records:

Ava Mendoza’s Alive Alone, Alive Together, a live album featuring drummer Hamid Drake on half its tracks;

Joel Futterman and William Parker’s Transcendent Universe, a gorgeous album of piano-bass duos;

and the Cecil Taylor Orchestra Humane’s At Iridium 2004, a digital set of 14 complete performances by the late pianist’s big band.

Our next two releases, out this fall, will be:

Wadada Leo Smith’s Constellations And Hemispheres, a collection of pieces by four different groups with overlapping personnel;

and Michael Sarian’s In This Desert, the latest album by his quartet Esquina and our first-ever double CD.

In the future, we want to expand our activities. We’d like to launch a literary journal, promote live music events, and more. And we’ve got several albums already in the pipeline for release in 2027. But all of this requires your support.

There are four ways you can support Burning Ambulance:

• donating through Fractured Atlas

• donating directly through our website

• becoming a paid subscriber to our newsletter

• buying our CDs

If you can’t make a donation yourself, please feel free to share this appeal with anyone you know who might be interested in what we do. And if you’re someone who knows the world of grants and fellowships and can help us in that area, please do get in touch. We thank you for your support.

If you’re already a paying subscriber, stick around past the paywall for some thoughts on some of the weirdest, coolest music I’ve heard all year.

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I’ve been following viola player Mat Maneri’s work for more than a quarter of a century. I remember seeing him perform with his trio with bassist Ed Schuller and drummer Randy Peterson at Cornelia Street Café in the late ’90s, and listening to him in guitarist Joe Morris’s quartet with bassist Chris Lightcap and drummer Gerald Cleaver, and in many other contexts. I interviewed him once in the early 2000s, and got to talk to him about playing a duo concert with Cecil Taylor at the Library of Congress in Washington, DC. (It was recorded and can be heard on the CD Algonquin.)

More recently, Maneri has been leading a quartet with pianist Lucian Ban, bassist John Hébert, and Peterson on drums. (Maneri and Ban have another project on which they and reeds player John Surman interpret the Transylvanian folk songs composer Béla Bartók collected at the dawn of the 20th century, and which inspired his own work.) The quartet has released three albums on Sunnyside. The first, Dust, was released in 2019; Ash followed in 2023; and Mist was released last month, concluding the trilogy.

Maneri is regarded as an important figure in the subgenre known as “microtonal jazz.” Though none of his own albums are included in this recent survey by Stewart Smith, he’s mentioned in the context of his work with his father, saxophonist Joe Maneri. Personally, I don’t think the m-word is all that important a factor when considering Maneri’s music, and neither does he; in that early-2000s interview I mentioned, he said, “Honestly, the microtonal shit is hardly existent in my jazz. Yeah, I play microtonally, I bend notes, I play out of tune, in tune, but I’m not sitting there measuring note against note… But I’m not really a big fan of people saying ‘microtonal violinist Mat Maneri’ because it has nothing to do with my jazz at all, honestly. It’s like saying ‘microtonalist Ornette Coleman,’ ’cause he was always playing weird notes, out of tune, this or that, but nobody calls him a microtonalist. I don’t believe in that. I just do what I do.”

Dust, released in November 2019, contains nine tracks, seven of which were written by Maneri and two — the opening “Mojave,” and “Two Hymns” — by Ban. One of the pieces, “51 Sorrows,” originally appeared on a late ’90s album of the same name by the trio I mentioned above, and another, “Red Seven,” is kind of a sequel to “Blue Seven,” from that group’s first album, Fever Bed. The music all has a hushed, cautious feel, like the players are feeling their way through a darkened room, or learning the song as they go. Maneri’s viola playing is astonishingly captivating; his long wavering lines pull you along with them, and he’s recorded so closely you can hear him breathing, which makes this album extraordinarily intimate when heard on headphones. The most upbeat piece, “Two Hymns,” has a melody that made me think of late-period Radiohead.

Ash, the quartet’s second album, was released in August 2023. The seven compositions — five by Maneri, two by Ban — were organized around a concept/theme of half-remembrance, of things that are so deep in your personal history that they’re part of your DNA. The liner notes tell us, for example, that the melody from “Earth” is derived from something Maneri heard his father Joe play, while “Brahms” is adapted from the composer’s Viola Sonata No. 1, which he heard James Bergin, a student of his father’s, practice in their house. “Moon” is also derived from something he heard Bergin play. And the album’s final track blends three melodies, one of which is a Sicilian lullaby Maneri’s grandfather used to sing to him. Ban’s “Dust to Dust,” meanwhile, is related musically and mood-wise to “Mojave,” from the previous album.

The bass and drums are slightly more active on Ash than on Dust. There’s still no suggestion of a steady beat, but Peterson in particular is doing more, working to keep the energy level up. This brings Maneri’s particular skills into sharp relief. What you realize listening to Ash is that it’s not about his timbre or the specific notes he chooses; it’s about his sense of time. His lines flow across the rest of the music in a way that seems counterintuitive, but never comes off as contrarian. There’s a kind of stillness to his playing that’s like he’s saying, You guys go on without me; I’m just gonna hang out here for a minute. But don’t worry, I’ll catch up. And he does, every time.

The final volume in the trilogy, Mist, came out just a few weeks ago, in late June. It’s more collaborative than its two predecessors — Maneri and Ban divide the writing evenly between them, four compositions each, and the title piece was contributed by the pianist. But there’s no immediate way to tell who wrote what, because a group voice has developed and established itself over the course of the two previous albums, and is unmistakable here. I can say that the music often seems to rise to a crescendo, particularly on “Achlys” and the short “Paul Motian,” which begins with a bass-and-drum passage that’s maybe Hébert’s most emphatic statement of the entire series. Maneri isn’t playing faster on Mist, but he does seem to be playing more notes, if that makes sense. Occasionally, he’ll end a line with a short burbling phrase in a kind of call-and-response with himself that’s obviously part of jazz language — it’s something a tenor saxophonist would typically do. There’s also more of a blues feel to Ban’s playing at times, though the rhythm section hasn’t changed their approach; time is always both implied and subverted. They require the listener to internalize a pulse, almost by osmosis. But by three albums in, if you’ve been listening carefully, you’re arguably the fifth member of the group and can do your part.

It’s not unusual for groups to stick around long enough, with the same members, to develop a collective voice. Saxophonist JD Allen’s trio with bassist Gregg August and drummer Rudy Royston made six albums between 2008 and 2015 that were different — one was mostly a suite, another a collection of pieces so short they were almost punk jazz — but unmistakably the sound of three people becoming one. Or think of the Miles Davis quintet of 1965-68, and how quickly and alchemically they became who and what they were, even while E.S.P. and Nefertiti were very different albums. But it’s more common in rock and metal than jazz. AC/DC, Motörhead, Rush, and ZZ Top all had the same lineups for decades, and while each album was slightly different from the one before (yes, even AC/DC), there were strong enough aesthetic through-lines that you could press Play on a new one with a few basic expectations, have those met, and enjoy the small surprises that much more.

Dust, Ash, and Mist are all quite consciously one body of work, a little more than two and a half hours of music, recorded in different studios over the course of seven years but conceptually and methodologically unified. In a way, these three albums can be compared to Bartók’s six string quartets, written over the course of 30 years but, when recorded/performed together (I recommend the Takács Quartet versions, from 1996), all one thing, a coherent world of sound. Approach them in that spirit.

Let’s kick off the second half of 2026 with one of our monthly roundups. This time, we’ve got a killer death metal record; a nostalgic instrumental hip-hop album; some organ music; three jazz musicians operating under a new name; and a trumpet/ajaeng duo. (What’s an ajaeng, you ask? Keep reading and find out!)

Astriferous are a death metal band from Costa Rica. They debuted in 2019 with a four-track demo, Raise High The Scepter Of Indulgence, following that up with the 2020 EP The Lower Levels Of Sentience and finally making their full-length debut on 2023’s Pulsations From The Black Orb. Their core sound was in place from the beginning; the demo kicked off with an eerie synth intro straight out of late ’80s/early ’90s death metal, and the riffs were a mix of downtuned chugging and dissonant squeals. The vocals were Rottweiler-esque, guttural to the point of incomprehensibility, and slathered in reverb.

On their first couple of formal releases, all of which have come via the London-based Me Saco Un Ojo label, they’ve cleaned up their music slightly, getting a little more punishing each time out. The mix on Pulsations From The Black Orb was loud and clear, allowing José Pablo Phillips’ bass to break through Federico Gutiérrez and Felipe Tencio’s storm of guitars and keeping the drums thunderous instead of typewriter-y. José María Arrea is not a subtle drummer, but his big rolls and almost hostile approach to the cymbals give the music a lot of energy. A weak drummer can make a death metal band sound like it’s hovering in place; Arrea keeps the train speeding down the tracks. And the vocals — from Tencio and Phillips — developed a flames-belched-in-your-face feel in the vein of Deicide or Ringworm (whose vocalist is literally named James “Human Furnace” Bullock).

The second Astriferous full-length, Atavistic Unraveling, came out last month. On first listen, it feels like a retreat from the occasionally almost prog-death creativity of Pulsations. The songs are a little more straightforward and pummeling, and the mix is thick and constricting. But as it goes on, subtleties reveal themselves, like the keyboards nestled within “The Floating Catacombs” and the repeated tempo changes in “Proto Embryo (The Third Tribulation).” They’ve got a new guitarist — Estaban Sancho has replaced Gutiérrez — and I’m gonna assume he’s the one throwing down all the shreddy solos. I’d be lying if I said I don’t miss the arty flourishes (and prominent bass breaks) of Pulsations, but Atavistic Unraveling is a powerful and confident statement from a band that’s continuing to grow and evolve. And the album’s eight-minute closer, “Resonance Cascade,” is a doomy epic that makes me think of a cross between Immolation’s Diabolical Conquest and Godflesh’s Pure. Astriferous are a band to catch up with, and keep an eye on.

This year is the 30th anniversary of DJ Shadow’s immortal debut album, Endtroducing….., and DJ/producer Akhavelli offers fantastic new work in the Shadow-y spirit on his own debut, Moorthodox Psyence. Where Shadow’s album was a dreamlike voyage through a late-night landscape lit by aurora borealis-esque swirls, Akhavelli’s is harder and heavier. Although it’s technically instrumental, there are voices on every track, drawn from records by screwface MCs and monologuing conspiracy theorists (as in the track above). The drums are huge, and Akhavelli samples psychedelic rock guitars and music from around the globe, giving every track an epic sweep. But there’s a darkness to this music, too. Lyrics are slowed down to a sepulchral crawl, singers groan wordlessly, the beats roll like tanks through the streets. It sounds like an alternate-universe version of Endtroducing….. that was released on WordSound instead of Mo’Wax. And if you’re an aging hip-hop head, it’ll push your nostalgia buttons like someone mashing keys on a sampler.

Michael Cloud Duguay is a Canadian composer, producer and sound artist. Kingdom Come, Kingdom Go is a collection of pieces performed on seven church organs, some of them quite decrepit, in communities around Newfoundland. The album was made using a solar-powered mobile studio and incorporates field recordings from the areas where the organs were located, including spoken monologues from some of the church/organ keepers talking about the old days in thick Newfoundland accents. If you’re expecting something like Áine O’Dwyer’s Music For Church Cleaners or Kali Malone’s The Sacrificial Code here, think again. Duguay is joined in this project by more than a half dozen collaborators, some playing flute, saxophone, or violin and others singing wordlessly. And the recordings are not presented “purely”; there’s plenty of overdubbing. Indeed, the track “Damnable Island” features all seven organs striking the same note, but because of their varying degrees of decrepitude and detuned-ness, it’s not the same note at all. The effect is like a huge wavering chord, with over- and undertones swirling and mingling together until you start staring at your palm, waiting for ants to come crawling out.

Greg Kelley is a trumpet player of the “extended technique”/hiss-and-whistle school; Yoona Kim plays the ajaeng, a zither-like Korean instrument that sounds something like a cello. Distractions For Trumpet & Ajaeng is a collection of five duo pieces on the Relative Pitch label. This is an album that requires headphones. Not because it’s quiet — it’s often very loud — but because the way the stereo field is laid out (Kim on the left, Kelley on the right) is a clue toward deciphering the music. If you were listening to this in mono, through speakers, there would be a great many moments where you would be unsure who was making what noise.

The 15-minute long “Dispute” is the album in microcosm; working very close to the microphone, Kelley creates an extraordinary array of sounds, from relatively clean squiggly passages to thick hisses and pops to a kind of metallic roar that I thought must surely be an overdubbed passage from Kim; it genuinely sounded bowed. Kim’s ajaeng is bowed, and somewhat heavier/lower than the gayageum, another Korean instrument recently brought to avant-garde listeners’ attention by DoYeon Kim (no relation). She creates a range of scrapes and drones, wavering in the air like a mirage, or the sounds a possessed house makes shortly before tearing itself apart.

The Phoenix Trio is a new group featuring saxophonist Mark Turner, bassist Joe Martin, and drummer Marcus Gilmore. Tomorrow Is Today is their debut album, released with funding from Giant Step Arts. Turner has made quite a few albums under Giant Step’s auspices, including 2023’s Live At The Village Vanguard (a counterpart to his ECM studio date Return To The Stars) and 2025’s Reflections On: The Autobiography Of An Ex-Colored Man. He has also appeared on four Giant Step-funded releases by trumpeter Jason Palmer (the two have developed a strong creative bond over the last decade-plus, appearing on almost all of each other’s albums) and Live In Brooklyn, the debut of another collective ensemble, The Fury, with guitarist Lage Lund, bassist Matt Brewer, and drummer Tyshawn Sorey. And he, Martin and Gilmore have creative relationships going back decades. The saxophonist and bassist worked with guitarist Kurt Rosenwinkel in the early 2000s, and all three of them played on guitarist Gilad Hekselman’s Hearts Wide Open and This Just In, and on Turner’s 2014 album Lathe Of Heaven.

Tomorrow Is Today offers six new compositions, four by Martin and one each by Turner and Gilmore. They’re straightforward tunes, meditative and gentle, beautifully recorded onstage at Ornithology, a club in Brooklyn. Turner’s always been a somewhat restrained player, but that’s even more true here than ever before. This album reminds me of late-period Joe Henderson; in the late ’80s and 1990s, the saxophonist toured often with trios (I saw him with George Mraz on bass and Al Foster on drums) that allowed him to explore standards and his own well-known tunes in a mellow, dry style, and that’s what the Phoenix Trio are doing here, except they’re not playing “Beatrice” or “Isotope.”

The largest project Burning Ambulance Music has ever been involved with — the Cecil Taylor Orchestra Humane digital box set At Iridium 2004 — is out today. 14 complete sets, recorded March 23-28, 2004, a total of over 16 hours of music.

Buy it now exclusively on Bandcamp.

The personnel consists of Cecil Taylor on piano and voice; Taylor Ho Bynum on trumpet, cornet, flugelhorn, and conch shell; Amir ElSaffar on trumpet; Stephen Haynes on trumpet, flugelhorn, and conch shell; Tobias Netta on trumpet; Jeff Hoyer and Steve Swell on trombones; Bill Lowe on tuba; Bobby Zankel on alto saxophone; Will Connell Jr. on alto saxophone, clarinet and flute; Elliott Levin on tenor saxophone and voice; Sabir Mateen on tenor saxophone and flute; JD Parran on bass saxophone and flute; Dominic Duval on bass; and Jackson Krall on drums.

The original recordings were made by Robert O’Haire; Kurt Gluck mastered them for release. The artwork and design are by I.A. Freeman.

Excerpts from the liner notes are below.

Cecil Taylor turned 75 onstage at the New York jazz club Iridium. The week of his birthday, he and his 14-member big band, dubbed the Orchestra Humane, performed 14 sets between Tuesday and Sunday: two a night on Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday and Sunday, and three on Friday and Saturday. Each consisted of a single composition, explored for somewhere between 50 and 70 minutes.

Taylor, who died in 2018, was often perceived by outsiders and those only superficially aware of his work as an avatar of “free jazz” and of unfettered improvisation. His most extroverted and obstreperous gestures — slamming the piano’s keyboard with his entire forearm, sweeping from one end of it to the other in waves of discordant, seemingly random notes — were taken to be the whole of his style and his sole artistic achievement. But in fact, he was one of American music’s great composers, a writer and conjurer of beautiful, romantic melodies, and more than that, he was a leader, someone who recruited musicians, gauged their abilities and their potential usefulness to him, and through rigorous rehearsal, some of which involved oral transmission of musical phrases and much more of which involved negotiation, conversation, adjustment, and reconfiguration, taught them a new language that they could speak with the rest of the ensemble when it was time to hit the stage.

This was his method beginning in the early 1960s, when he abandoned sheet music and chose instead to teach pieces to his bandmates from the piano, whether playing the melody or by humming or singing phrases. Saxophonist Archie Shepp said, “He would play the line, and we would repeat it. That way we got a more natural feeling for the tune and we got to understand what Cecil wanted.”

Members of Taylor’s ensembles were always free to interpret his music in ways that suited them. Bassist William Parker recalls an unnamed horn player telling the pianist that he couldn’t play all those notes, to which Taylor responded, “Then play the ones you like.” Violinist Ramsey Ameen, a member of the brilliant 1978 sextet incarnation of the Cecil Taylor Unit, shared a story of working out an arrangement:

“Cecil had given me and [bassist] Sirone specific parts to play, and I found my part very ‘un-violinistic.’ It was really a piano part assigned to the violin. So in rehearsal I started to improvise a ‘transformation’ of the given notes in a way that exploited the sonorities and structure of the violin. Sirone and I had already, during the marathon rehearsals, connected on the basis of being at times a ‘string section,’ so he immediately responded with his transformation of the given bass part. As we worked through this ‘experiment’ with the other instruments silent, my friend Raphé [Malik, trumpet] objected, saying to CT, in reference to me, ‘But he’s not playing the part.’ CT immediately reassured him, ‘It’s OK. They are developing something’... the more we rehearsed the better and fresher it got, and it really is quite amazing how all the parts mesh so dynamically. We got there through a gradual process of uncovering something optimal by revisiting the material repeatedly, but without a preconception of what the final sound was ‘supposed’ to be.”

The financial realities of avant-garde music being what they are, Taylor rarely had the opportunity to work on large-scale music. He led a student ensemble when teaching at the University of Wisconsin in the early 1970s, and brought them to New York for a concert; he put together a very large band of more than 30 players for a Carnegie Hall concert in 1974; he created a European Orchestra and a Workshop Ensemble (with entirely different personnel) during his fabled Berlin residency of summer 1988; he performed with another very large group in San Francisco in 1995; and he worked with the pre-existing Italian Instabile Orchestra in 2000. But for the most part, his music was performed by groups of no larger than five or six, until the early 2000s.

In 2002, Taylor recruited the Sound Vision Orchestra, a pre-existing group, for a concert at New York’s Knitting Factory. The piece they performed, “With Blazing Eyes And Open’d Mouth,” featured two dozen musicians, including three female vocalists. After that one-off show, he decided he wanted to continue working with large ensembles, so a dozen or more musicians — some of whom had been part of the Knitting Factory show, and others who had not — were assembled into what became the Orchestra Humane. For several years afterward, the Orchestra would come together, rehearse extensively, then perform a week’s worth of shows at Iridium.

“What is composition but nothing more than having people recognize the organizational palette out of which they draw,” Taylor said in Christopher Felver’s 2010 documentary All The Notes, which included rehearsal footage of the Orchestra. “[The ultimate] struggle is to challenge the musical concept that America has adopted from the West. What you think improvisation is, the masters of that craft in America always knew how to improvise in a way that the people in their orchestras understood.”

Stephen Haynes said, also in All The Notes, “He’s developing in all of us a body of vocabulary, language sets which are constantly reconstructed, deconstructed, reconfigured and inverted and moved in all different kinds of directions in a very plastic sort of way. The time keeps breathing and expanding and contracting and moving in a very particular way, which is a very nonlinear way, not necessarily a Western way at all, certainly not necessarily a narrative way, which is not to say that there isn’t storytelling totally bound up in all of this, because stories are being told.”

The Iridium orchestras were the ultimate fulfillment of Taylor’s compositional principles, and the music meant a great deal to him. Haynes took on some of the organizational duties, hiring players and even helping arrange payroll, and was genuinely surprised by the depth of Taylor’s commitment to the project.

“Once I understood the payroll,” he said, “and once I had helped him negotiate the fee for the orchestra with the club owner, I knew that Cecil was going into his pocket to pay the band, which is not something Cecil was ever known for. He was known for the opposite. So I said to Cecil, Listen, doing the math, even if you’re paying everybody like me — and maybe some people were getting more or whatever — I said, you had to go in your own fee as a leader to pay the band. And I said, excuse me for saying it to you this way, but you’re not exactly known for that kind of generosity. You’re not known for behaving that way. And he cracked up… ‘Yeah, I know, I know,’ he said. ‘But I really wanted everybody to be comfortable. I really wanted everybody to keep doing this thing.’”

The music performed at Iridium was extraordinary even by the standards of Taylor’s work. The group would play long single pieces that lasted between an hour and 80 minutes, but where in previous decades the band might have been allowed to explode at length, everyone soloing at once, the 21st century orchestras demonstrated deep compositional discipline and rigor.

What’s immediately noticeable about the music is how much of it is generated by the horns. They play keening melodies that harmonize in wavering call-and-response fashion, the music moving through the sections like a breeze through a field, blowing this way and that. Taylor enters with placid confidence, leading only in the sense that he has spent hours, days, weeks of rehearsal showing the musicians the map and now trusts them to get where they’re going.

The brass and reed sections play scalar melodies, stacking them up and harmonizing like a choir, only gradually making room for individual players to take turns in the spotlight. When they do, their solos are not the fire-and-brimstone sermons of free jazz; they are often beautiful, romantic statements that hew closer to R&B or gospel language.

Taylor’s own playing, while occasionally violent, is just as often delicate and lyrical. He restrains himself from what had been his trademark style of “accompaniment” for decades, letting the horns speak for themselves without charging along behind them. He even returns to plucking the strings inside the instrument.

Taylor was sometimes criticized for being too busy an accompanist, but he told journalist A.B. Spellman that early in his career, a trombonist taught him an important lesson: “It was Lawrence Brown who said to me that a piano player is like a whole orchestra. He has to cover everything and feed everyone.” And while there are stretches of this music where he is playing so forcefully — huge clanging chords, thrilling romantic eruptions, full-forearm slams of the keys — that he may seem to be ignoring everything around him, what he is doing fits at all times with what the horns are doing.

And there is often a remarkable subtlety to his playing. He begins sets by strumming the piano’s strings like a zither, and his trademark lightning runs have a dancing lightness. And the balance between Taylor’s leaping energy and the rumble and roar of the low horns (tuba! bass sax!), with precise drum strikes in between, is consistently thrilling.

Dominic Duval and Jackson Krall perform largely ornamental functions, never attempting to assert time. This is rubato music, full of swells and dips. It manifests less like a tidal wave than like a jungle, but a calm one that allows you to look around and take it in at leisure.

Despite the freedom granted to the sections, the music never falls apart. Indeed, when one examines the way a given set rises from calm beginnings, builds to overlapping solos that are characteristically, if not stereotypically “free jazz,” then somehow — how? — ends in calm once more, it’s as if someone has thrown a lasso around a storm cloud and reeled it down to Earth to rest in the grass like a dozy cow. When it’s all over, the listener’s gradual recognition of its structure feels like stepping just far enough back to realize that one has been looking not at a stone wall but a cathedral.

There are 14 sets of music here. The shortest runs 52 minutes, the longest nearly 80. Each is unique, and each has at least one moment that will shock even listeners who consider themselves steeped in Cecil Taylor’s music. But they also have much in common, since they are the work of a group of musicians who have spent a long time learning to make (as in generate) music together. There are no supporting players here; everyone is of equal value. Replace anyone, and the whole thing would be different. But it’s not. It’s this.

For a week in March 2004, these 15 men made this music. If you were there, you probably staggered away at the end of a set, head swimming, trying to hold onto memories of particular moments even as the impression of the whole dissolved, too much to absorb. But now, careful listening at leisure is possible, and whether you are encountering this music for the first time or revisiting it two decades later, you’ll hear more than you could ever have imagined.

There are 19 Leo Records releases newly added to Bandcamp today as well. These include titles by pianist John Wolf Brennan; saxophonists Carlo Actis Dato and Wally Shoup; vocalist Lauren Newton; pianists Aki Takase and Alex von Schlippenbach; and more. There are well over 400 Leo Records titles now available on Bandcamp. Dive in and swim around.

If you’re a paying subscriber, venture beyond the paywall for articles on Johannes Vermeer; sensitivity readers; political violence; and Luddites.

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Can you believe this year’s half over already? Well, it is, which means it’s time to take stock of things. I’ve been doing these lists since 2022, and the methodology hasn’t changed: every January, I start an Excel spreadsheet that I call “INCOMING MUSIC.” I organize it by Artist, Album Title, Release Date, Genre, and whether it’s a Promo, a Purchase, or just a Download from somewhere. I also make notes on Coverage: whether I include it in my Stereogum jazz column, review it for The Wire or DownBeat, or write about it for Burning Ambulance or the Shfl.

It seems like I get (or bother to download) fewer promos each year, because my spreadsheet is only 225 albums deep so far. (Box sets count as a single entry.) Despite that, it’s been a pretty good year. The 50 albums that have given me the most pleasure so far this year are listed below, unranked, in alphabetical order. A lot of them are part of my Bandcamp collection, so feel free to check that out, too.

a•pe•ri•od•ic, Aus Der Nacht: A 45-minute piece of experimental chamber music composed of 71 discrete, often fascinating musical moments.

Dave Adewumi, The Flame Beneath The Silence: The debut album by an exciting new trumpet player, with Joel Ross on vibes, Linda May Han Oh on bass, and Marcus Gilmore on drums.

Melissa Aldana, Filin: A collection of romantic Latin boleros and ballads by a thoughtful saxophonist who lets herself be swept away by emotion here.

Atlantis Jazz Ensemble, Mystic Suite: The third album in a decade by an Ontario-based spiritual jazz ensemble.

Lakecia Benjamin, We Dream: A typically passionate and high-energy album by a ferociously talented alto saxophonist and several high-profile guests.

Patricia Brennan/Sylvie Courvoisier, Talamanti: Piano-vibes duos by two of the most creative and adventurous instrumentalists around.

Deafkids, Cicatrizes Do Futuro: Harsh, metallic (in multiple senses) electronic punk from Brazil.

Dimmu Borgir, Grand Serpent Rising: Grandiose, symphonic black metal with a cartoonish quality that’s difficult to dislike.

Dave Douglas, Transcend: An impassioned collection of tunes inspired by Duke Ellington’s Sacred Concerts, with James Brandon Lewis on tenor sax and Tomeka Reid on cello.

Arnold Dreyblatt, Descendants: Music For Four Pipe Organs In One Space: Like the title says — four very different-sounding organs playing a single nearly hour-long piece, all drones and fragile harmonies.

El Chon-Chon, Live En Playa Los Molinos: A free but swinging sax-bass-drums trio session, with occasional poetry (in Spanish).

Eximperitus, Meritoriousness Of Equanimity: Dense, pummeling but cosmically inclined death metal.

Ayman Fanous, Brooklyn Stories: Five CDs’ worth of improvised encounters between a guitarist who doubles on bouzouki and a bunch of notable out-jazz names.

Jimmy Farace, Big Shoulders, Big Sounds: A swinging, compositionally ambitious hard bop record led by a baritone saxophonist.

Frozen Soul, No Place Of Warmth: Heavy, rifftastic death metal in the style of Bolt Thrower, with special guests from bands like My Chemical Romance, Machine Head and Sanguisugabogg.

Harriet Tubman & Georgia Anne Muldrow, Electrical Fields Of Love: Psychedelic, atmospheric dub-metal with improvised-seeming vocals floating through on a cloud of effects.

Alden Hellmuth, Tether: A young, creative alto saxophonist backed by two bassists (one bowing, one plucking) and a drummer who also plays with Thundercat and OFF!.

Joe Henderson, Consonance: Live At The Jazz Showcase: Rip-roaring late ’70s live action from the legendary tenor saxophonist, with Joanne Brackeen on piano.

Christopher Hoffman, Rex: Solo acoustic and electric cello pieces utilizing overdubbing and subtle production effects to create a powerful storm of sound.

Immolation, Descent: A punishingly heavy but surprisingly subtle album from death metal legends who’ve never made a bad one.

Jazz At Lincoln Center Orchestra With Wynton Marsalis, We The People: A collection of new pieces written and arranged by orchestra members, inspired by paintings in the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art; swings hard, in a romantic tone-poem style.

Darryl Jenifer, The Weather Channel: Jazzy, dubbed-out instrumentals from the Bad Brains bassist, with John Medeski on keyboards and a few surprising guests.

DoYeon Kim, Wellspring: The only person playing the gayageum (a traditional Korean instrument, like a koto) in free improvisational contexts; this, though, is a set of compositions, disciplined and passionate at once.

Sofia Kourtesis, DJ-Kicks: Sofia Kourtesis: A romping collection of dreamlike but high-energy electronic tracks, perfect for driving around in hot weather with the windows open.

Klaus Lang, Geschreiben In Wasser: Five chamber pieces (two clarinets, violin, viola, cello, piano and/or electric organ) by an Austrian composer, sometimes droning, sometimes more sound- than “music”-focused, all compelling.

Intermission! Here’s a video of Napalm Death live at Hellfest last week. Vocalist Mark “Barney” Greenway is looking a lot like John Darnielle these days…

James Brandon Lewis Quartet, Omni: The fifth studio album by one of the best American saxophonists currently working; also an overtly religious work.

Nduduzo Makhathini, The Myth We Choose: The South African pianist’s 12th album, and fourth for Blue Note, adds electronics to his spiritually focused modern jazz.

Magda Mayas, Chant: Three intense, extended works for prepared piano.

Jason Moran, Jason Moran Plays Duke Ellington: An astonishingly powerful exploration that marries Ellington to Cecil Taylor.

Darragh Morgan, Spin: New Music For Violin & Orchestra From Northern Ireland: I’m used to hearing violinist Morgan in more intimate settings, so these big, sweeping orchestral works are thrilling in a different way.

Angelika Niescier, Chicago Tapes: Saxophonist Niescier recruits flutist Nicole Mitchell, saxophonist Dave Rempis, vibraphonist Jason Adasiewicz, bassist Luke Stewart and drummer Mike Reed for a collection of high-energy blowouts.

Adam O’Farrill, Elephant: Trumpeter O’Farrill debuts a high-energy electric jazz band.

Odd Okoddo & Okoya Nengo, Palagoma: An astonishing combination of adventurous electronic music and vocals from a traditional Kenyan singer; like nothing else I’ve heard this year.

Onilu, Jakutá’s Dance: The second album by a percussion ensemble featuring Kevin Diehl of Philadelphia’s Sonic Liberation Front and legendary drummer Joe Chambers.

Jeremy Pelt, Our Community Will Not Be Erased: Trumpeter Pelt is backed by some extraordinary players — pianist Orrin Evans, bassist Buster Williams, and drummer Lenny White — for a collection of modern jazz with a 21st century edge.

Chris Potter, Alive With Ghosts Today: A jazz concept album about John Brown with fascinatingly ramshackle instrumentation.

Tomeka Reid, Dance! Skip! Hop!: The latest from cellist Reid’s brilliant quartet with guitarist Mary Halvorson, bassist Jason Roebke, and drummer Tomas Fujiwara.

Marta Sanchez, For The Space You Left: After three albums leading a quintet, the pianist in saxophonist David Murray’s quartet makes her solo debut with an album of pieces for prepared piano.

Arturo Sandoval, Sangú: High-energy Latin jazz-funk featuring all the screaming trumpet you’d expect from this high-note master.

Serokolo 7, Maramfa Musik Pro: Adventurous electronic music from South Africa, like industrial crossed with footwork; the snares clap hard, as additional percussion adds double-time rhythmic layers.

Aaron Shaw, And So It Is: Mellow spiritual jazz from an LA-based saxophonist who’s collaborated with Carlos Niño and others.

Spirit Adrift, Infinite Illumination: The final album by one of the best doom/power/trad metal albums America’s produced this century; they’ll be missed.

Matthew Stevens, Matthew Stevens: Solo work from a guitarist I first became obsessed with when he was in trumpeter Chief Adjuah (fka Christian Scott)’s band.

Teratoma, Longing Voracity: Slow ’n’ low death metal from Germany; RIYL Immolation, but there’s plenty of originality here.

Mark Turner, Patternmaster: The third album by a quartet featuring Turner on tenor sax, Jason Palmer on trumpet, bassist Joe Martin and drummer Jonathan Pinson; it’s on ECM, so it’s tasteful, but exploratory.

Ben Wendel, BarCoDe: On which an alto saxophonist surrounds himself with four mallet instrument players; it’ll swirl your brain around but good.

Immanuel Wilkins, Live At The Village Vanguard Vols. 1-3: The three volumes of this live set by alto saxophonist Wilkins and his quartet were released separately, so this is a triple pick, but they’re all great.

Nils Wohlrabe/Karin Johansson/Hasse Westling, Sonic Waves: Adventurous, who-made-that-noise? music from electric guitar, prepared piano, and upright bass.

Rob Zombie, The Great Satan: Zombie reunites with the guitarist and bassist from his first solo album for a hard-charging, thrashy blast of industrial metal.

Various Artists, J Jazz Volume 5: Deep Modern Jazz From Japan 1970-1988: Every volume of this incredible, now-complete series is worth your time — the range of music presented is far too broad for a one-line blurb, so just listen.

Various Artists, Next Wave Acid Punx Trois: Another series of compilations ends; this one is a triple-disc set of electro, industrial, and other music best heard while chainsmoking in leather pants.

I wrote about John Coltrane’s Africa/Brass for Everything Jazz. It was one of the first Coltrane albums I heard, and its opening track, “Africa,” has the same hold on me now as it did 40 years ago. Read the piece here.

Clive Davis died this week at 94. You could argue that the music industry died with him.

Davis was the president of Columbia Records from 1967-73, an extraordinary time of creative and business growth for the music industry as a whole. At Columbia, he signed artists like Aerosmith; Chicago; Earth, Wind & Fire; Pink Floyd; Santana; Bruce Springsteen; Sly and the Family Stone; Iggy and the Stooges; Billy Joel; and many others. He also served as a kind of patron for Miles Davis, encouraging him to transition from acoustic jazz to electric music and play rock clubs, and cutting him checks that didn’t really match up to his actual record sales.

In 1973, he was pushed out of Columbia for… reasons; Rolling Stone cited “allegations of misuse of funds and providing drugs to artists and disk jockeys,” while the label sued Davis over $94,000 in unjustifiable expenses, including allegedly billing them for the cost of his son’s bar mitzvah. One year later, in 1974, he launched Arista (a division of Columbia Pictures, formed out of the ashes of the Bell label), where he stayed until 2000. Arista became a commercial powerhouse, signing artists ranging from Barry Manilow, Air Supply and Dionne Warwick to Patti Smith, Ministry, and Lou Reed; he also brought Aretha Franklin, the Grateful Dead, and the Kinks on board, and of course also gave the world Whitney Houston and Kenny G.

But while Davis was well known for his ability to pick (and make) hits, he also showed a willingness to support more challenging music. When he founded Arista, he acquired the Freedom label and formed a second avant-garde jazz division, Arista Novus; across these three imprints, he released or reissued albums by Anthony Braxton, Henry Threadgill, Cecil Taylor, Julius Hemphill, Oliver Lake, Andrew Hill, the Art Ensemble of Chicago, and more. And those albums, too, were given every chance to succeed in the marketplace; Clive Davis was absolutely the kind of old-school record man who’d say, in effect, “Let’s see if we can’t find an audience for these weirdos.”

Davis was in some ways the ultimate music business guy. He had big ears and would take chances, but his goal was to turn a profit, and eventually hits became his primary interest. He convinced himself he knew better than the artists… and he was often proved right. (I interviewed Carlos Santana in 2019, and I asked him about his 1999 album Supernatural; he freely admitted that it was a Clive Davis production from top to bottom, and that Davis’s hit-making instincts had revived his career.) Now that the music business has ceased to be about selling records to people, there will almost certainly never be another like him. But he shepherded a lot of great art out into the world in his time. Respect to a real one.

If you’re a free subscriber, today’s newsletter ends here. If you’re a paying subscriber, stick around for a special discount offer on an upcoming BA release, and articles on Dwight Macdonald, cowboy life, Isaac Hayes, Ricky Jay, and white nationalism.

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Pianist Karin Johansson has been a friend of BA for several years now. I first heard her as part of Arter, a duo with saxophonist Lisen Rylander Löve; I reviewed their album. She’s also been a member of several other projects, including the group Ord; Quagmire, a trio with bassist Nina de Heney and drummer Henrik Wartel; a duo with bassist Finn Loxbo; and the Jonny Wartel (Henrik’s younger brother) quartet. When she released I grunda vikar är bottnarna mjuka, a collaboration with composer Rosanna Gunnarson, I interviewed her via email.

On New Year’s Day 2022, we put on the Burning Ambulance Festival, an online-only event streamed via Bandcamp, and she contributed the video below.

Karin has two new albums out, with different groups. The first is Sonic Waves, a collaboration with guitarist Nils Wohlrabe and upright bassist Hasse Westling. The second is Rörane, a meeting between Karin’s group Quagmire and Christer Bothén on bass and contrabass clarinets. Each is as unique as everything else in her fascinating catalog.

Sonic Waves came out in April on the Outerdisk label. Although the music was, I believe, improvised, it is a meticulously structured album. The tracks are simply titled “Sonic Waves” I-V, but they’re presented out of sequence: II, III, I, IV, V. “Sonic Waves III” is the longest, running more than 15 minutes; “Sonic Waves IV,” at 6:45, is the shortest.

The music is highly atmospheric, almost to the point of illusion. This is one of those records where you’re going to hear sounds you can’t identify. In addition to playing guitar through various effects, Wohlrabe adds electronically treated recordings of the ocean, which seem mixed with analog synths like something out of Klaus Schulze or early Tangerine Dream. At times, particularly when listening on headphones, the sounds he produces are like something huge breathing right behind you.

Johansson, meanwhile, scrapes and scratches at the strings of the piano, and when she strikes the keys, whatever she’s done to the instrument makes it sound wounded in some way — not just “out of tune” but somehow almost nervous about even expressing itself. Westling’s bass isn’t heard that often, and is the most unadorned and “natural” of the three instruments, which helps to ground the music at key moments. He keeps it from sounding like field recordings from inside a haunted space station.

Rörane is the second Quagmire album. The first was technically credited to its three members (Johansson on piano, Nina de Heney on bass, and Henrik Wartel on drums) and just called Quagmire; it came out on Creative Sources Recordings in 2019. This time out, they’ve adopted the collective name, and added a guest: Christer Bothén on bass and contrabass clarinets. Also, Johansson is playing piano, prepared piano and zither. Lots of zinging strings this time out.

The group has a collective language, one to which Bothén contributes ably. They make him feel welcome, and perhaps more importantly they make the listener feel welcome too, through the simple expedient of repetition. Yes, unlike many improvising musicians, they make the same noise (or pattern of noises) twice! Even more than that! The opening title piece runs nearly 19 minutes, and long stretches of it feature an identifiable bass clarinet/bass figure, repeated like a riff. The four shorter pieces that follow are less structured and more about mood, but the intensity of the performances helps to keep it all interesting. This is a short album, only about 38 minutes in all. The four players sketch their general idea quickly, then explore it together and while not every track is as good as the first, they’re all worth hearing at least once.

The variety of approaches in Karin Johansson’s music means I’m always going to listen at least once. You should be listening too.

For several years in the early 2000s, Cecil Taylor led an orchestra of 12-15 members through an annual week of performances at the New York jazz club Iridium. They performed to packed houses, but none of that music has ever been released… until now. At Iridium 2004 is a digital-only set containing 14 complete performances by the Orchestra Humane — 16 hours of music in all. The music is extraordinary, and the recordings capture it in all its glory. The official release date is July 3, but you can stream or purchase the whole thing now. Get yourself one.

Support BA: Burning Ambulance is a 501(c)(3) tax-exempt nonprofit. Donations to us are tax deductible under Internal Revenue Code (IRC) Section 170, and we are qualified to receive tax deductible bequests, devises, transfers, and gifts under sections 2055, 2106, or 2522. Click here to make a donation, and share that link with your rich friends!

I finished reading Lee Clay Johnson’s Bloodline this week. Back in April, I came across a review by Francine Prose of it and Carl Hiassen’s latest beach read. I pre-ordered Bloodline as soon as I finished the review, and although it took me a couple of months to get through it, because other things ate into my reading time, it was about as good as I hoped. In fact, I’m now thinking I need to pick up his first book, 2017’s Nitro Mountain.

Bloodline is the story of Winston Alcorn, his sons Dustin and James, his wife Mandy, and the people they interact with in a small, gritty corner of Tennessee. In the book’s first chapter, Alcorn convinces a woman, Miss Becka, to give him a job at the dying sawmill she owns. No sooner is he on the shop floor than he chops off his right hand, using the resultant court case to take ownership of the property, which he quickly (the novel jumps forward several years) turns into a chaotic open-air flea market and auction site. Things escalate until Alcorn is floating up and down the local river on a refurbished ferry, broadcasting his own right-wing talk radio program and campaigning for the state legislature, his key issue the defense of a local Confederate statue set for removal. Miss Becka, living in her falling-down family home and tending bar in a nearby dive, watches it all happen, seething.

Winston, who changes his name to Wins-a-ton in a surprisingly successful bid for folk-hero status, is a somewhat despotic, glowering figure, constantly pitting those around him against each other. The effect on his sons is particularly painful; each runs away, and is inexorably drawn back. But the women who exist in his orbit, barely able to hold his attention, have ideas of their own.

Plotwise, the book is like a cross between A Face In The Crowd and one of the grimier works of Harry Crews, like A Feast Of Snakes or The Mulching Of America. Wins-a-ton is all too believable, a cunning, amoral idiot with an eye for an angle and an outsized sense of his own importance in the world. And each of his sons bears the same curse, in a way; each believes in a dream version of themselves, and either injures themselves in pursuit of it or grows bitter from seeing just how out of reach it is. Some of the best, hardest-hitting writing in Bloodline comes when younger brother James moves out and tries to get a job and just be a person in the world, only to be confronted with cold-eyed exploitation. Wins-a-ton’s two henchmen are more pitiable figures, hapless and only occasionally useful to their ungrateful lord.

The female characters, though, aren’t dreamers. They’re pragmatists, making the best of their respective situations and taking what’s take-able when an opportunity comes. Mandy and Miss Becka, separately and together, not only push the story to its somewhat inevitable (and well-handled) conclusion, but provide an alternate way of looking at, and dealing with, the blasted moral universe Johnson has set up.

Bloodline doesn’t turn its characters into hicksploitation cartoons for the amusement of jaded urbanites, but neither does it portray them as irredeemable monsters. (Honestly, if the book has a flaw, its that Wins-a-ton isn’t grotesque or larger-than-life enough; at times he’s less an antagonist than a looming darkness. But any child who’s ever cowered in real fear of a father’s anger will recognize that.)

Bloodline is literary fiction that doesn’t suck. Buy it.

Did you know there’s a documentary about Leo Records and its founder, Leo Feigin? Leo Records: Strictly For Our Friends was completed in 2024 and has played the odd festival, but is still seeking distribution. It looks really good to me, and I’d love to watch it if it ever pops up on a streaming service.

This is your reminder that Burning Ambulance is currently working with Leo to put the Leo Records catalog up on Bandcamp. There are over 400 titles available now, with more coming every month. Dive in — there is so much to hear.

If you’re a free subscriber, today’s newsletter ends here. If you’re a paying subscriber, stick around for articles on the Renaissance, America as seen from abroad, bands that were big in the UK but not the US, and David Hockney. Plus, a special paid-subscribers-only offer you won’t want to miss out on!

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BIG NEWS! After literal months of back-and-forth with the IRS (they had so many questions about exactly what it is we do here), Burning Ambulance is officially a 501(c)(3) tax-exempt nonprofit! Donations to us are tax deductible under Internal Revenue Code (IRC) Section 170, and we are qualified to receive tax deductible bequests, devises, transfers, and gifts under sections 2055, 2106, or 2522. Click here to make a donation, and/or share that link with your rich friends.

Oval’s Systemisch is one of the most beautiful albums of the 1990s — hell, of the 20th century. Its approach to melody and rhythm, its astonishing subtlety combined with a kind of swooning romanticism, are unlike anything else, but it’s a genuinely pathbreaking work that inspired an entire school of electronic music that came along in its wake. And as with many great works of art, its creators — Markus Popp, Frank Metzger, and Sebastian Oschatz — moved on almost immediately. In fact, Metzger and Oschatz left Oval in 1995; it’s been Popp’s project ever since.

Systemisch was first released 32 years ago, on the German label Mille Plateaux. But according to Discogs, it was released in the US on June 18, 1996, on Thrill Jockey, and that summer was when I and a lot of other people heard it for the first time, and were stunned. For me, the effect has never truly worn off.

The first sound you hear is a soft ticking, not steady but syncopated, an almost swaying, almost swinging beat with a very quiet ambient tone humming beneath it. This lasts for about five seconds, before a loud bass sound booms and the music gets noticeably louder. A gentle, ambient synth tone begins looping behind the ticking beat, and two other sounds emerge: a soft, repetitive pattern, and an intermittent ping, almost like sonar. The big underwater bass boom recurs, too, but not often. Those are all the elements that make up “Textuell,” the album’s gorgeous manifesto of an opening track.

The gentle ticking noise I described was made by sampling the sound of a damaged, skipping CD. Oval’s music uses these tiny crunches — called “glitches” — as its primary rhythmic device. There are no drum machines on this album, no breakbeats or pounding techno rhythms, even though the last track is called “Gabba Nation,” named for an ultra-hardcore techno style popular in Germany and the Netherlands at the time.

The 11 tracks on Systemisch are all similar in style, but subtly different. Some have stronger melodies, while others feel like loops allowed to run for a few minutes, then stopped. The digital crunches and clicks are louder and more disruptive on certain pieces, and the melodies (all seemingly sampled and looped; I don’t think anyone plays a keyboard on this whole record) are sometimes quite intricately layered, shifting again and again, but at other times they flow smoothly, barely seeming to change at all.

A lot of avant-garde music, from Stockhausen and Cage to Autechre, seems to be about choosing a set of tools, establishing/writing a set of parameters, and then letting the process play out and seeing what results. This is why it’s often called “experimental music.” And later Oval releases, like the aptly named Ovalprocess, would go that route. But on Systemisch, Popp and his bandmates were far more deliberate. Like Kraftwerk, they were fascinated by technology — particularly consumer technology — but wanted to make something beautiful with it. The track titles are often straightforward, like “Compact Disc,” “Post-Post,” or “The Politics of Digital Audio,” but some are more poetic; “Schöner Wissen” translates to “know more beautifully.”

A couple of months before Systemisch was released in the US, Simon Reynolds wrote a feature for The Wire about the Mille Plateaux label, in which Popp and Oschatz were quoted. It’s interesting to see them attempt to squirm out of the traditional interview-with-a-musician boxes. Popp, for example, describes their work as “not so much about music as the technical implementation of notions of music… It’s an effort in sound-design rather than music with a capital M. The main content of our effort is to have an audible user-interface.”

In another attempt at deflection, Schatz claimed Systemisch “was done with a very cheap MIDI set-up and a borrowed copy of Aphex Twin’s Selected Ambient Works Vol. II.” This was a joke based on Richard D. James having complained that Oval was ripping off his ideas.

Popp was apparently less jokey about it, offering Reynolds a cagier, more defensive response: “That album is composed of material that is really old, and it got edited, layered and recombined so many times, it’s stupid to ask whose music is this?… That is the only truly negligible aspect in our music. Most of the CDs we used were rented, and often they didn’t have their covers.” He even tried to act like the use of CDs — the crucial compositional element of Systemisch — wasn’t crucial to their work, adding that “we did use CDs, but that’s neglectable, there are so many other things we could have used. The important point was that the CD player has no distinction if it’s an error or a proper part of the recording, it’s just doing calculations, algorithms.”

That latter statement is a perfect example of Pop Art philosophy. You can trace its core assertion back to Duchamp (a urinal can be art) or to Warhol (a Brillo box can be art). Yes, it’s true that the CD player just reads the data it’s presented with; it doesn’t understand the data it’s reading. (“Artificial intelligence” is an oxymoron.) But the broader point is that so-called “errors” can be beautiful, and can be repurposed to become “a proper part of the recording.” Think of Brian Eno’s “Oblique Strategies” card: “Honor thy error as a hidden intention.” Think of record scratching.

(Side note 1: Yes, Systemisch — which seems as much like music designed for CD as anything has ever been — has been available on vinyl since its initial release. There was even a cassette version.)

(Side note 2: Personally, I wish Duchamp’s reason for signing a urinal “R. Mutt” and placing it on display had not been to showcase “everyday objects raised to the dignity of a work of art by the artist’s act of choice,” but rather to simply say, Look how beautiful this quotidian object is! Look more closely at the world around you; you’ll be amazed what you’ll see. Oh, well.)

Systemisch broke through into mainstream culture to a surprising degree. “Textuell” was even used in a commercial for Giorgio Armani’s Acqua di Gio perfume:

And like record scratching, albeit on a smaller scale, digital glitching became a new compositional tool. A few years later, Mille Plateaux released the Clicks & Cuts compilation, a 2CD set of abstract electronic music, some so ambient it barely existed, some loud and aggressive, but all exploring the rhythmic and compositional potential of digitally fractured sounds. That was followed by the 3CD Clicks & Cuts 2 in 2001, and the 2CD Clicks & Cuts 3 in 2002.

(Another compilation, Electric Ladyland Clickhop Version 1.0, also released in 2001, attempted to bridge the gap between the softly ticking beats of glitch and the downtempo, bass-heavy hip-hop of Electric Ladyland, a six-volume series featuring tracks by Techno Animal, Alec Empire, Spectre and other purveyors of industrial strength noise terror. Maybe I’ll write about that series one day.)

Glitch never became a pop style; it was too weird to be fully absorbed. But it did migrate into slightly more mainstream environs here and there; Björk sampled the Systemisch track “Aero Deck” on her 2001 album Vespertine, and the subgenre “microhouse” adopted the clicks and crunches of glitch to four-on-the-floor dance music. Eventually, as the music migrated from hardware (the use of distressed CDs as sample sources) to software (creating one’s own clicks and skipping sounds in a laptop), existential questions began to arise. What should it be called when one creates from scratch — no pun intended — a sound that mimics an error, but is in fact not an error but an effect deliberately, even painstakingly, achieved?

As much as I enjoy the Clicks & Cuts compilations, and Vespertine, and various ultra-minimal electronic releases on labels like 12K, though, Systemisch stands alone. Its gentle beauty, perfectly reflected in its pastel gray cover art, makes it one of the most purely blissful albums I own. And despite the ultra-’90s methodology behind its creation, it really is a timeless work of art. If you’ve never heard it, I envy you your first encounter.

For several years in the early 2000s, Cecil Taylor led an orchestra of 12-15 members through an annual week of performances at the New York jazz club Iridium. They performed to packed houses, but none of that music has ever been released… until now. At Iridium 2004 is a digital-only set containing 14 complete performances by the Orchestra Humane — 16 hours of music in all. The music is extraordinary, and the recordings capture it in all its glory. It’s out July 3; pre-order your copy now.

Guitarist James “Blood” Ulmer died last week at 86. He first came to prominence via his connection with Ornette Coleman: he was a member of the saxophonist’s live band in the early ’70s, and Ornette (along with bassist Jamaaladeen Tacuma and drummer Denardo Coleman) played on Ulmer’s debut album, Tales Of Captain Black, which was released on the Artists House label in 1979. Ulmer made some other interesting appearances in the late ’60s and early ’70s, too, appearing on Joe Henderson’s Multiple, Big John Patton’s Accent On The Blues and Memphis To New York Spirit, Rashied Ali’s Rashied Ali Quintet, and Larry Young’s Lawrence Of Newark. He also played with Frank Wright on a gig that was released in 2012 as Blues For Albert Ayler. And in the late ’70s, as he was beginning his career as a solo artist, he played on two of Arthur Blythe’s best albums, Lenox Avenue Breakdown and Illuminations. Those two in particular are must-hears.

Ulmer’s initial string of solo albums — Tales Of Captain Black, Are You Glad To Be In America?, Free Lancing, and Black Rock — featured collaborators like saxophonists Oliver Lake and David Murray, trumpeter Olu Dara, guitarist Ronny Drayton, bassist Amin Ali, and drummers G. Calvin Weston, Cornell Rochester, and Ronald Shannon Jackson. Together, they swirled the blues, harmolodic funk, free jazz, and Ulmer’s barbed No Wave/noise guitar into a totally unique sound that could make your head spin.

I’ll be honest, though; those records didn’t do a whole lot for me. I found Ulmer’s explosive bursts of notes and the way the bass and drums were mixed (metallic and dry/thudding, respectively) to be harsh and unforgiving, and the horn lines were often shrill. Basically, it was a whole bunch of tones and timbres I didn’t like, used to create music I found overly busy and aggressive, without the cathartic release of punk or free jazz. Everything felt simultaneously unfettered and tightly coiled. It made my eyeballs twitch, and not in a good way.

(Counterpoint: Here’s Melvin Gibbs on Ulmer, from a 2019 issue of the Oxford American.)

Some other Ulmer projects sounded great to me, though. In 1983, he took a sharp left turn, abandoning “free funk” jazz-punk and forming a new band, Odyssey, with violinist Charles Burnham and drummer Warren Benbow. That trio made two amazing albums — Odyssey and 1984’s Part Time, the latter recorded live at the Montreux Jazz Festival — and expanded to a quartet with the addition of Amin Ali for 1986’s Live At The Caravan Of Dreams. The contrast between Ulmer’s guitar and Burnham’s droning, almost psychedelic violin, with Benbow laying down a strong backbeat for them, was really beautiful, combining harmolodic blues with a kind of rural minimalism, like Tony Conrad jamming with Junior Kimbrough. Twenty years later, Ulmer reunited Odyssey for a second studio album, 2005’s Back In Time. It’s really good, too, and still in print.

Here’s an Odyssey performance from Warsaw in 1983:

(Side note: guitarist Brandon Ross joined forces with Burnham and Benbow to form the trio Breath Of Air, whose debut album was released on Burning Ambulance Music in 2022. We still have CD copies available. Get yourself one.)

The other Ulmer project I really liked was his band the Music Revelation Ensemble, which went through a few different lineups over the years. The original version, heard on 1980’s No Wave, had David Murray on tenor sax, Amin Ali on bass, and Ronald Shannon Jackson on drums. In 1988, they made a self-titled album with Jamaaladeen Tacuma replacing Ali, while on 1990’s Elec. Jazz the lineup was Ulmer, Murray, Ali, and Cornell Rochester. That version of the group stayed together for 1992’s After Dark, but on 1994’s In The Name Of…, Murray was gone, replaced by Arthur Blythe on alto sax, Sam Rivers on tenor, soprano, and flute, and Hamiet Bluiett on baritone, depending on the track. Knights Of Power, released in 1996, kept Blythe and Bluiett, and on the final Music Revelation Ensemble disc, 1997’s Cross Fire, Calvin Jones (a blues bassist who’d worked with Muddy Waters, John Lee Hooker, and Pinetop Perkins) replaced Ali and the saxophones were handled by John Zorn and Pharoah Sanders. It’s fun to hear Zorn so overtly imitating Ornette — even more so than on his album of Coleman tunes, Spy Vs. Spy — and Sanders is in a gentle, reflective mode.

I didn’t keep up with Ulmer’s 21st century activities. He seems to have made a lot of blues records. I don’t know if I’ll ever need to hear those. But the Odyssey and Music Revelation Ensemble albums are all-time, not a dud in the bunch. They’re not easy to find, unfortunately. Part Time and Live At The Caravan Of Dreams were only ever issued on LP, and have been out of print for decades, and the MRE discs (except for No Wave, which was on Moers Music) are all on the Japanese DIW label, so probably out of print and definitely not on streaming services. But they’re worth searching for. Ulmer was one of those rare musicians who really did sound like no one else; he could unleash streams of notes like he was balling up barbed wire in his hands and throwing it right at your face, and when he opted for distortion, he could blow your hair back as hard as Sonny Sharrock or Pete Cosey.

Ava Mendoza was a big admirer of Ulmer, and posted a tribute to him on Instagram. Her new live album Alive Alone, Alive Together (with Hamid Drake) is out now. Get yourself one.

Such Music is a monthly radio show hosted by Rihards Endriksons, journalist and artistic director of Latvia's Skaņu Mežs festival, and devoted to new works of free improvised music, either previously unheard or created specifically for the show. The show is produced in collaboration with Burning Ambulance. This month’s show focuses on the music of Japanese free jazz saxophonist Homei Yanagawa, exploring his views on improvised music and playing a wide range of recordings, from his most recent album Solo Update to collaborations with guitarist Max Devereaux, fellow alto player Ryoko Ono, his wife Nobue Yanagawa on drums, and many others. The Gaya-based Yanagawa is a unique and highly respected voice on the Japanese free improvised music scene. His solo playing has been particularly praised by critics; he is known for a distaste towards acrobatic styles, and his music has been described as “serious and heavy.” Listen on Mixcloud.

If you’re a free subscriber, that’s it for today. If you’re a paying subscriber, stick around for articles on tradwife literature, programmer science fiction, and critic A.S. Hamrah, and a special exclusive offer!

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I love living in Montana. It’s absolutely beautiful; the forests, rivers, and lakes in my corner of the state are incredible. I see hawks and eagles fly overhead on a regular basis. Deer show up in my yard to eat dandelions. But culturally speaking, it can be a little isolating. There are lots of musicians around playing one variety of country or folk music or another, but not a whole lot else. (Hails to Bill Kautz, who has a weekly radio show in Missoula on which he regularly plays Burning Ambulance Music releases.) So when I come across something a little more aggressive, I get excited.

Galvanist are a metal band from Bozeman, Montana. So they’re not exactly “in my neighborhood”; Bozeman is over 300 miles away, about five and a half hours by car. But they’re fellow Montanans, so when I heard their album The Silence Between Stars and liked it a lot, I decided to share their work with you all. (I asked for an interview; they said no.)

The Silence Between Stars is their first official full-length, following Connection, a three-track EP from 2022 that they describe as a demo. Connection is over 40 minutes long, though (longer than Silence, in fact), so it could just as easily be called an album. They’ve only had one membership change between releases: vocalist and rhythm guitarist Tanner Erhart, lead guitarist Micah Tippit (who also plays keyboards and sings), and drummer Chris Navarro are constants, while original bassist Seth Francis has been replaced by Kevin George.

Each of the three tracks on Connection — “Inner Experience,” “Tears of Eros,” and “Acéphale” — is named for a work by Georges Bataille. The lyrics are hard to decipher, but the music has a certain ritualistic quality, particularly the nearly 20-minute “Acéphale” (translation: “Headless”; it’s named for a secret society Bataille formed in the 1930s, and the journal they published). Black metal has always been entwined with a certain mysticism, and Galvanist, on these songs, were making music that would appeal to fans of Deathspell Omega, Funeral Mist, and other acts who used the style as a vehicle to explore philosophically rigorous concepts rather than play around with Satanic kitsch.

Galvanist are much more than a black metal band, though. There are strong elements of black metal on Connection, but there are a lot of other things going on, too. The way the guitars and bass intertwine can be traced all the way back to Tony Iommi and Geezer Butler’s almost jazzy interactions in Black Sabbath, and Erhart isn’t a black metal shrieker; his voice is a hoarse, bearish roar that reminds me of Aaron Turner (of Isis, Sumac and Neurosis). The slowness of their music also reminds me of Isis, and they use synths and electronics that give their compositions a dark romanticism without getting anywhere near Goth or industrial. And Tippit occasionally grants himself extended guitar solos that flow organically out of the songs.

The Silence Between Stars begins with “Bornless,” a minute-long synth intro that bleeds seamlessly into the first song, “Atrophy”; as the synths fade away, guitar feedback rises and the band comes pounding in. The song has a post-hardcore/post-metal feel reminiscent of Neurosis or Converge. The riffs are slow and oceanic, but Navarro’s drumming is extremely busy — he’s doing the most of anyone, pounding out tribal rhythms, then jumping into extended double-kick passages as the guitars soar and bulldoze across the landscape. Erhart’s lyrics feel like an invocation, welcoming us into the world the band inhabits; the song’s chorus is “Arise, void treader/Trembling/Upon feet not your own.” Midway through the nearly 10-minute track, a second, chugging riff arrives, signaling a change of gear. The second half is more cathartic, building to a passionately eruptive guitar solo and even a blast beat section before returning to earth.

The two longest tracks on the album, “Dreich” and “Spiorad” (both are over 10 minutes), have as their titles Scottish words. “Dreich” is an adjective used to describe cold, rainy, miserable weather; “Spiorad” translates to “spirit.”

“Dreich” has a slow, trudging feel. The drums are a slow march downhill, and the guitars repeat simple riffs that weigh on the listener’s shoulders like the burden of existence. The lyrics are delivered first as spoken poetry, then as anguished shouts; there’s almost nothing “musical” about Erhart’s performance here — it’s extraordinarily raw. As on “Atrophy,” Navarro launches a blast beat section right at the song’s midpoint, after which a more aggressive, chugging riff emerges, but the overall mood of the piece remains oppressive.

“Hauntology” is the most aggressive track on the record, and the shortest of the four full songs at just 7:53. It also features two guests: Jacob Myers delivers a short rant toward the end, before screaming the word “faithless” several times, and Harul Vinay adds synths deep in the mix that buzz like wasps infused with cosmic rays.

“Spiorad” is the natural conclusion to the album. The longest track at 10:53, it’s also the most elaborate, and features more guests: Kat Stephens adds multitracked, clean choral vocals that appear at the moments of highest drama, and Will Summers creates an ambient noise piece, gentle electronics mixed with haunted-house piano, to take it out. Until that final minute, though, this is a high-energy song with extremely busy and pounding drums, an unusually high-pitched guitar melody (the most overtly black metal touch on the whole record) and a strong sense of dynamics — it shifts gears several times, almost working as a suite. Erhart delivers lyrics about transition and evolution, in the cosmic sense: “My inhalation echoes the heart of the void… We are not alone/We are not but just ourselves/All that is proceeds from what was… I cross this threshold towards worlds strange and wonderful.”

The Silence Between Stars is an extremely artful set of very well-constructed songs, clearly part of an artistic school (if you like Isis, if you like Neurosis, if you like Converge, you will like Galvanist) but ultimately unlike anything else I’ve heard this year. Bassist Kevin George mixed and mastered it, and it sounds great, especially on headphones.

Galvanist are playing this year’s Fire In The Mountains festival, which is happening about 90 minutes away from me in about six weeks. If you’re gonna be there, check them out.