#filamental

Michael Krassner & John Dieterich — bullish(ish) (Moone)

Neither Michael Krassner (Boxhead Ensemble, many production gigs) nor John Dietrich (Deerhoof, duos with Mary Halvorson and Tashi Dorji) are strangers to the idea of sitting down with another guitarist and seeing what comes out. This record isn’t exactly an improvised encounter — that was their first gig, and bullish(ish) is the result of recordings that were made shortly after — but there’s still an air of “let’s see what happens” about it. Side one (both sides spin at 45, making this a short LP or bus-commute-friendly digital listen) is a sequence of fragments, some unemphatically wiggy, some lurching in a clankety-rocking way. Side two drifts into a shiny atmosphere that flickers and evaporates around the Laraine Kaizer-Viazovtsev’s pensive violin. Some records try; this one just is.

Bill Meyer

Magda Mayas’ Filamental — Murmur (Relative Pitch)

In other settings, Magda Mayas’ handiness with keyboard preparation opens up extraordinary realms of sound. But her own playing is submerged into the discourse of a string-heavy octet in Filamental, which has become the Berlin-based improviser’s vehicle to explore group behavior. One feels more than hears her prepared piano tolling within a moving mass of strings and reeds on Murmur. The musicians seek to emulate the combination of spontaneous reconfiguration and precision maneuvering achieved by flocks of birds, attaining achieve cohesion through pitch selection as each instrument contributes sounds near to the rest. But as the sounds gather, some player will assert a contrary notion, which may cause the rest to pivot or simply absorb the dissenting gesture. This is the group’s third recording, and while the organizing principal has been different each time, their common preference for apposite understatement makes this recording one that rewards recurring scrutiny.

Bill Meyer

Dustin O’Halloran — Lumiere (Splinter)

Lush bolts of silky strings unfurl in slow melodic patterns. Piano chords strike thoughtful, melancholic poses. Poised somewhere between ambient music, soundtrack and new classical, Lumiere was the fourth album for film composer and A Winged Victory for the Sullen artist Dustin O’Halloran. The album debuted in 2011, and all of the original tracks remain. To this, however, O’Halloran has added four more cuts, all recorded around the same time as the original material. These new tracks hold up very well against the ones from before. “Fragile N. 1” infuses the soft crescendo of piano and drums with altered angelic voices, a larger palette companion for the piano-led, string-throbbing “Fragile N. 4” from the earlier disc. A Robert Lippok remix of “We Move Lightly” interjects a playful percussion cadence into O’Halloran’s slow-blooming atmospherics. Lumiere is lovely but a little repetitive; play it when you want to wind down.

Jennifer Kelly

Ben Richter — Mymerian (Sedimental)

Label name and artistic concept converge on this set of slow-motion, long-tone music, which was recorded on a cold evening using the 120-year-old pipe organ at Epsilon Spires in Brattleboro, Vermont. Temperature matters, because it dropped the instrument’s tuning, adding a degree of low-frequency disorientation to the three pieces played by organist-accordionist-composer Ben Richter. The music is layered, and each layer is coded with both personal and geological time stamps, but you don’t need to know anything about them to appreciate this music’s looming murk. The ways its monochrome façade fronts endless depth makes it an ideal surface on which to project your own! For example, the way that bassist Mike Bullock and cellist Laura Cetilia’s lines arc and wind through Richter’s thick keyboard sonorities on the title track evokes a view of pterodactyls gliding through the black clouds belching forth from a volcano.

Bill Meyer

The Sleeves – The Sleeves (12XU)

Jack Cooper purposely streamlined Modern Nature into a tight quartet for their most recent album The Heat Warps; he goes even sparser on this new collaboration with guitarist Tara Cunningham. These are intensely intimate songs that the pair formed through joint improvisation on electric guitar. The clean, ringing tones are entwined, as are the pair’s hushed vocals. Aside from occasional whistling and vocal overdubs, The Sleevesrelies entirely on raw guitar interplay and delicate vocal melodies. This lean and gentle approach really emphasizes Cooper and Cunningham’s probing guitar work, encouraging deep listening and introspection. Their sound functions perfectly as a minimalist foil to the groove-based tunes of Modern Nature, using sound and silence in equal measure.

Bryon Hayes

St. Silva — Forager (AKP)

St. Silva’s Ben Dexter Cooley made these luminous ambient compositions partly in his studio, but also partly in the verdant swamps and meadows and mountain paths of upper Vermont. It’s a mix of electronic futurism and primordial nature, shot through with bird song and vibrating with synthesized calm. You can move through these tracks as if through sun-dappled forests, pushing back the undergrowth to catch a glimpse of red-bellied robin, pausing in cooler shade to appreciate a sunny clearing opening out of old growth trees. Cooley lists no fewer than 11 bird species represented in Forager, but he is by no means a nature documentarian. He views these sounds as raw materials, an element in pieces that defy easy classification. Pulsing Germanic synths percolate the buzz of “Sun Flies,” while haunting long tones hover in droning “Little Acorn.” Imagine Roedelius sauntering though the sudden warmth of Vermont spring or Tangerine Dream admiring local flora and fauna from their gleaming spaceship. Wholly natural—and beautiful for it—but also fit together with art and care.

Jennifer Kelly

Whitelands — Sunlight Echoes (Sonic Cathedral)

Whatever the reasons, it’s a real shame that Whitelands have split. After an excellent 2024 debut (Dusted review here) and opening for Slowdive on tour momentum seemed to be building, but whether it’s the brutal financial realities of being a band in 2026 or any other of the innumerable reasons bands stop working, the release of Sunlight Echoes earlier this year showed no signs of a sophomore slump. Maybe a little tougher and scrappier than Night-bound Eyes Are Blind to the Day (even as standout tracks “Songbird (Forever)” and “I Am No God, an Effigy” brought in Iskra Strings to sweeten the mix), if anything their songwriting and playing suggested they were about to go to another level even as Sunlight Echoesitself is once again one of the best shoegaze records of the year. For most of us, these two short LPs (each clocking in at just over 33 minutes) are all we have to remember Whitelands by, but they will be remembered.

Ian Mathers

You-On — New Side (12XU)

New Side is the result of three improvisational sessions between pianist Masami Tomihisa and drummer Jim White. On these recordings, the pair play with sound, acknowledging this with the name they chose for this project, You-On. They shift between moods, carrying a sprightly bounce at times, turning introspective at others, and bringing the thunder when the situation calls for it. Synchrony reigns, belying the fact that this is the pair’s first recording together. The mind meld is palpable, and while the piano-drums combo is a rarity, New Side will have listeners chasing down more.