Mark Isham’s Harnessed Noise
On ‘At the Carousel Club,’ Mark Isham turns a wall of vintage synthesizers, Nels Cline, and a string quartet loose, all while keeping the editor in his head at bay.
Los Angeles
The Warm, Cosmic Company of megiapa
On megiapa’s ‘Intentions,’ voice notes from her grandmother, her mother, and her closest friends drift through the synth haze, a family album cut to beats.
Deniz Cuylan Scores a Life With Luca
The Istanbul-born film and television composer discusses 'For Luca' — his earlier songs recast in his friends' voices, the dog it mourns, the freedom of being one crew member among many, and the melancholy he prefers to share.
Grief, Glitch, and the Harp of Lara Somogyi
Harpist Lara Somogyi talks through 'a [time] patterned,' from delay pedals and disrupted loops to Steve Reich and 'A Pattern Language,' the architecture handbook that gave the album many of its titles.
Ginny Winn's Visual Trip to the Music
"I get close. I always want to see the pupils in their eyes," Winn wrote of her method — and 'Grievous Angels, Trout Masks, and American Beauties' is the first gathering of what that closeness yielded, from a coffee shop outside Eureka to the Grateful Dead's ranch.
Yuka Honda's Impossible Dreams — On Celebrating Yoko Ono
For Honda, an artistic format is a language rather than an identity — a conviction she shares with Ono, and one that made curating a tribute feel less like a departure than a translation.
Speculative Babies — The Inner Children of Guest Bartender Deborah Toyota
Recorded fast and almost entirely improvised, 'Music for Babies' sets Julia Shapiro's melodic instincts against Samur Khouja's appetite for dissonance, and the conversation takes in sad clowns, nose flutes, hearing music as a child, and why they never went to meet Maria Nissan.
Azar Lawrence Is the Lineage
Half a century after the Prestige trilogy, the tenor saxophonist marks 'Turn the Music Up' with an account of Horace Tapscott's Los Angeles, McCoy Tyner's touch, Pharoah Sanders's generosity, and a practice routine he hasn't altered since he was a teenager.
The Whole Greater Than Its Parts — Bondo on 'Bondo'
Years of playing in the same converted room have left Bondo convinced the band is a thing separate from the four people in it.
Wild Up Conjures the Holy Presence of Julius Eastman
On the occasion of 'Julius Eastman Vol. 5: Gay Guerrilla', Wild Up conductor Chris Rountree discusses the hybrid written-and-oral tradition of Eastman's scores, the ensemble's rehearsal practice of triangulating meaning, and the Black, gay minimalist's enduring claim on the present.
Tape Hiss and Tenderness — zzzahara's 'Distant Lands'
zzzahara's fourth album trades the romantic preoccupations of earlier releases for something harder-won — a tender, analog meditation on grief, mixed identity, and the strange clarity of sobriety.
Frank Fairfield — Around the World at 78 RPM
Born Frank Martinez and raised as a Mennonite in Guatemala, the self-taught musician scoured junk shops and swap meets around the country and abroad for 78 RPM records, reinventing himself as a pre-war folk and blues character during a brief recording career.