small immunities

Knockout Artist — Ramshackle Deluxe (Knockout Artist)

Talk about 80s music, and you’re liable to get gushy pledges of allegiance to gated drums and gravity-defying hair. But there was a counter-movement of rock musicians who rejected artificiality by tapping into country sounds and themes. Whether by design or happy accident, Knockout Artist, a quintet from Chapel Hill NC, nails that vibe. While Phil Venable drawls alternately defiant and shame-faced sentiments, a triple front of guitars and steel snarl and spiral over crisp drum cadences that’ll dispatch rock critics of a certain age to their basements to pull out their Long Ryders, Eleventh Dream Day, and Band of Blacky Ranchette records. If those names mean nothing to you, well, maybe Knockout Artist will.

Bill Meyer

LDL — The Eerie Glow Of Jellyfish (Relative Pitch)

LDL = soprano saxophonist Urs Leimgruber + analogue synth player Thomas Lehn + amplified spinet player Jacques Demierre. This Swiss/German combo has roots in an earlier trio that, with Demierre on piano and the late, august bassist Barre Phillips occupying the space now held by Lehn, had a fine two-decade run. Changes in gear and personnel contribute to the simultaneously bruising and delicate dust-ups that play out across this concert recording. Amplified, the spinet (an old parlour harpsichord) emits a whirlwind of brittle textures that shatter and coalesce with the synth’s alien squelch. Long, lacerating sax thrusts puncture and stir the action, resulting in a group sound that is remarkably unfamiliar given how long these guys have been around.

Bill Meyer

Donny McCaslin / Ingrid Jensen / Bruce Barth / David Ambrosio / Victor Lewis — Civil Disobedience (Blue Frog Records)

Turbulent times can bring out the best in artists, encouraging them to push deeper into themselves to make art that reflects the moment. Such was the case in late 60s jazz, an era that David Ambrosio’s new quintet looks to on their new release Civil Disobedience. Think about it like this: it features a blue-chip lineup (McCaslin, Jensen, Barth, and Lewis) playing Blue Note material. But what could have been just another standards album has slightly adventurous programming: Bobby Hutcherson’s “For Duke P,” Harold Land’s “Poor People’s March,” and Joe Chambers’s “Ankara”. Both McCaslin and Jensen play well here: on “For Duke P,” Jensen’s solo has her darting around the melody and stretching out long lines with ease. Meanwhile McCaslin gets a rich, sweet tone out of his horn on “Irina” and plays some nice, almost circular figures where he goes up and down his horn’s register. And with a rhythm section that gives them plenty of space to work — Lewis’s deft touch on drums never overpowers the players and Barth’s piano keeps them from flying too far into space — it’s an engaging, occasionally exciting listen.

Roz Milner

Pefkin — Unfurling (Morc)

Gayle Brogan has been making albums as Pefkin for over 20 years now, and Unfurling displays an unhurried, patient calm that can come across as lovely or foreboding, sometimes very close together. The two extended tracks anchoring this 40-minute collection, the opening slow-building radiance of “Green Bound in Ice and Snow” and the penultimate, starkly crawling “My Breath the Sea,” show her work in its strongest form, but the more compact other four tracks expand on those strengths in varied ways (from the mournful strings of the Penda’s Fen-quoting “The Dissonance” to the relatively pastoral “Sun Flecks”). Just like her music, Brogan’s sung lines are also careful, enchantingly placed, giving Unfurling a subtly and pleasingly otherworldly feel.

Ian Mathers

Raw Distractions — S/T (La Vida Es un Mus)

Tokyo-based Raw Distractions play a variety of punk rawk that walks (or stumbles) a fine line between pastiche and appealing artlessness. Is the band’s combination of street-punk scruffiness, Dead Boys’ energy and Johnny Thunders-style guitar heroics a calculated simulation of 1978’s overripeness, or are Raw Distractions so out of step with the contemporary that they’re really playing the music that they have to play? The riffs are sweet and then slashing, compellingly melodic and tuff — like Mick Jones working out on an early Sun Records tune. Songs like “Raw Dis” and “Midnight” have a hip-shot snottiness that’s winningly stubborn in its adulation what was so exciting about late-70s punk. But do we really need music this out of time? Aren’t we all just about out of time, as the earthball cooks and platform capitalism gleefully empties everything of real value? Maybe a raw distraction — and guitars this gloriously beat to shit — is precisely made to order for 2026. Amazon can next-day the vinyl to you.

Jonathan Shaw

Seefeel — Sol.Hz (Warp)

Though they share a label with electronic legends Aphex Twin, Autechre, and Boards of Canada, Seefeel have flown relatively under the radar since they first started releasing music in the 1990s. Their latest album, Sol.Hz, conjures a gaseous, shadowy soundworld that draws influence from the more minimal, industrial side of their labelmates, especially early Aphex and the more accessible side of Autechre. However, the most resonant comparison is probably Slowdive’s Pygmalion, in the way the looped, disembodied elements — synths, beats, Sarah Peacock’s ghostly voice — seem to hover apart from each other rather than locking into a rhythmic grid. “Everydays” rolls past without the individual elements coalescing; “Ever No Way” starts off-kilter, but as more elements are introduced, locks satisfying into place, like Boards of Canada’s “Jacquard Causeway.” It’s a disorientating and deeply atmospheric listen that paints a vivid picture across its runtime without overstaying its welcome.

Tim Clarke

Charles Joseph Smith — Collected Works and War of the Martian Ghosts (Sooper)

The 88 Keys That Opened Doors: An Inspiring Memoir of an African-American Man Who Achieved the Impossible Even As He Faced The Challenges of Being on the Spectrum (self-published)

Dr. Charles Joseph Smith is a living legend of the Chicago underground scene who has self-released over sixty albums on tape and cd-r. In the early 2000s I was introduced to a cassette of Smith waxing poetic on the word “Linden” through mutual friends in the Midwest noise rock scene, and it was immediately apparent that I was experiencing the work of a visionary artist. Despite being an internationally-renowned classical pianist, Smith is often found banging his head at basement noise shows and dancing at under-the-radar house music parties. This long-overdue four-sided adventure from Sooper Records compiles selections from the artist’s vast catalog created over the past thirty years, including both midi and piano realizations of Smith’s sci-fi opera War of the Martian Ghosts. It’s highly recommended that readers also pick up Smith’s autobiography, The 88 Keys That Opened Doors, to more fully understand the remarkable life of this composer. After having spent several years mute as a child, Smith astonished his family by playing perfect classical licks on the piano without previously having played a single note. While navigating the tremendous challenges presented by autism, Smith not only earned a doctorate in musical arts and traveled the world performing, but he also crafted a unique personal world through the power of music and became a beloved member of the underground community. Hopefully this beautiful collection of music becomes just one part of a multi-volume series of releases in the future.

Justin Rhody

Various Artists — Red Xerox: Chicago Youth Beat 2020-2025 (Desert Island)

Chicago’s Hallogallo scene flourished in the early 2020s, an interconnected community that played each other’s shows and sat in on each other’s bands and sometimes shared familial and romantic ties. Horsegirl, the buzzy, drone-y, all-female trio, made the first mark outside the neighborhood, but post-punk noisemakers in Lifeguard weren’t far behind (or too much ahead of poppier outfits like Sharp Pins and Friko). Yet the scene was more diverse that outsiders, perhaps, have given it credit for. This compilation yields the expected amount of fuzz and chime and agit-punk, but also a helping of confessional singer-songwriter music (Amaya Penya’s “Song for Avi,” and Free Range’s “Lost and Found”), dub (Current Union TM’s “Dukkha Coca”) and Tobin Sprout-ish lo-fi (Dwaal Troupe’ “En Utero”). The comp covers a lot of ground, but it’s carefully sequenced, It flows like a mixtape despite the diversity of ideas. And that’s maybe what makes it so special: Red Xerox tracks a scene that was exacting but inclusive, a little nerdy but full of enthusiasm. DIY, it seems, is in good hands for at least one more generation.

Jennifer Kelly

Geiger Von Müller — Neocubist Blues (Self-Release)

Guitar blues can be a traditionalist’s straight jacket, but it doesn’t have to be. In Neocubist Blues, London-based experimental guitarist Geiger Von Müller offers 14 mostly brief interludes that filter the drone and haunt and sting of blues guitar through a modernist lens. Here the slippery tones of bottleneck slide careen slightly off center, the steady thump of the Delta turns abstract and mathematical. “Toys in the Attic (Parts 10-12)” slashes and careens through heavy rhythmic territory, its percussive attack violent, almost punk. The slide gets viewed from three temporal angles: “Before the Slide,” “The Slide” and “After the Slide.” Each demonstrating considerable knowledge and skill in the blues form without pledging fidelity. Lots of guitarists follow Fahey, but few show affinity for BOTH his blues and his sonic experiments. Geiger Von Müller does, and that makes his Neocubist Blues worth exploring.