Warm, offhand American music, taken up across a single August — the sound of the year leaning over, of late summer beginning its slow combustion into autumn. All August I have moved through J.J. Cale the way the month itself moved — slowly, without urgency, the light already thinning at its edges, the whole season…
For a week I have lived inside three Urfaust songs — a Dutch duo who kept the devil and the light in the same throat — and the feeling still refuses its name. This week I have played almost nothing but three songs by Urfaust, over and over, until the room took their shape. They…
Not one album this time but a whole body of work — the artist I return to most in this corner of music, and the single thread that runs through all of it. This time I don’t want to write about one record but about all of them, because with Glaring the discography is the…
An album I found around its tenth anniversary and only now returned to, kept on endless repeat — a world that seems to belong to any time. I found Alone in the Dark Wood around its tenth anniversary, a decade after it first appeared, and only lately have I come back and kept it on…
Two obscure records, heard the same week — one by a fallen pioneer, one by a duo almost no one has heard — and what they turn out to share. Both are transmissions from the far edge of things — warmth smuggled inside cold machine music, sentiment carried through circuitry — and both, in their…
This Sounding turns inward — to the making rather than the hearing. A new work, only begun, and the strange condition of being the one it comes through. Whenever I begin, the process is the same, and it is governed almost wholly by intuition. I am lending voice and sound to something I cannot see,…
The third Sounding leaves single works and mixes behind for a whole record, and for the thing underneath all of them: duration, and what it asks of the listener. For a while now I’ve been experimenting on myself with sound, sometimes for months — sitting inside those long, high-frequency recordings that drift around everywhere now,…
The second Sounding leaves the single composition behind for a whole mix — a guest set I made for Fort Evil Fruit’s Vortex of Ironic Calamities (episode 14) on Éist. It extends the world of God Is Everything You Are Not, an album that formed in the wake of a recurring dream: a lost sister…
Now and then, a piece of music undoes something in me, and I want to understand how. These are my soundings: one album, song, composition, or performance at a time, followed as far as words will go. Trivium, a short and unusually austere organ work, premiered in Tallinn in 1976 and marks one of the…