Journeys in Sound & Music
As a practicing psychoanalyst and a former founding member of the San Francisco psychedelic collective Citay, New York based guitarist and composer Ezra Feinberg is able to create music that appeals on multiple levels – thoughtful and humanistic on one hand and buoyantly experimental on the other. In calling his forthcoming third album Soft Power,…
Read More
As I am sure many readers are already keenly aware, Headphone Commute is a tremendous online resource for electronic, experimental and instrumental music that has long been setting the bar to which many independent blogs aspire to including this one. In fact, it was my own early encounters with and lessons from HC that sparked…
Read More
Eli Goldberg‘s traces his start in music back to the age of 5 when he began playing a Casio piano a babysitter brought to his house. Music became a full-time pursuit upon graduating high school starting an indie rock project before discovering modular synths and developing a growing interesting in ambient. Out of a desire…
Read More
The first time I heard the music of Ottmar Liebert over 30 years ago, I was struck by the sheer grace and romance of his flamenco guitar as well as the elegant simplicity of the arrangements. It was deeply introspective and yet emotions flowed freely through the music. Something about it just resonated. Of course,…
Read More
The humble EP is often overlooked when it comes annual roundups, but this format continually proves it can provide us with outsized moments of poignancy, wonder and delight and for me the year in music would not be the same without them. Here is a roundup of twelve such releases from 2023.
Read More
Crossing and blending many genres, this is a list I especially enjoy putting together each year for its variety, eclecticism, and spirit of sonic exploration. Here is a selection of memorable releases from the musical edge lands where electroacoustic music and field recordings meet folk, jazz, post-rock, and other analog experiments in sound.
Read More
The act of creating a sense of a place or capturing a moment in time is a fairly common motif in the realm of instrumental music, especially the ambient genres, but it is intrinsically at the very core of these works released in 2023. Some are personal narratives, and some are depictions of landscape either real…
Read More
Best known to her audience as Lau Nau, Finnish composer Laura Naukkarinen has spent the past six years working in the realm of modular synthesis but for her, the soon to be released new album Aphrilis “felt like a needed moment to embrace songs with lyrics again.” The title, which derives from a Latin word…
Read More
Sotto Voce may technically be the debut solo album by composer & multi-instrumentalist Claire Deak, but it should be noted that it represents the artistic summation of a considerable amount of both musical experience and scholarship. The title of the album is taken from an Italian expression that refers to speaking or singing so as…
Read More
Stationary Travels 