#michael zerang

The titular ES is Edith Steyer, a clarinet and alto saxophone player who lives in Berlin. Her visit to Chicago in March 2023 precipitated this meeting. Planning ahead, she asked percussionist Michael Zerang, a Chicago-based drummer who has spent quite some time in Berlin, to recommend female players. Zerang gave Steyer a list, and from it she picked Mabel Kwan, a Texas-born pianist who splits her time between contemporary classical music, improvisation and performance art. They played one concert and made one trip to Experimental Sound Studio; The Foreign In Us was the result.

Steyer came to improvised music through early classical training, but also the study of anthropology. Compounding those experiences with living in a city where you can’t walk down the street without hearing a few different languages, let along the music piping out of street food stands, Steyer has come up with a sound that is hard to situate culturally. Across this album’s ten tracks her melodies offer traces of European concert halls and East Mediterranean gathering spots, and her classically woody tones twist towards roughness and back again. Zerang grew up in Chicago, but his parents were Assyrian, and the breadth of his associations — he's recorded with Peter Brötzmann, Bill MacKay, Hal Rammel, and Spires That In The Sunset Rise — attest to the versatility of his multi-hued, contour-conscious method. Kwan was well set on the path of playing new classical repertoire before restless curiosity impelled her to play with Chicago improvisers such as Beth McDonald, Jason Roebke, and Chris Dammann. She’s the kind of musician who doesn’t forget things, but judiciously selects what she brings to any situation.

Back to that title, notice that the foreign resides within a group, not an individual. They found the unknowns that make up this music together, compounded from all they know and do. The muted thump of prepared piano mixes with rapped and rubbed metal on “Broken Piece,” shuffling together in coexistent proximity to Steyer’s raw tones. Burred reed lines get bisected by abrupt, precise keyboard stabs on “Distant Nearness.” While one can hear bits of things each player has done before, their interactions also yield something unfamiliar, idiomatically informed but unbound by idiomatic rules. Their music is an unknown zone, ripe for revisiting again and again.  

Illinois Glossolalia starts with such an air-shredding detonation - via the raucous clang and impassioned howling of quick-hit opener “Child” – that it’s hard to imagine how this collaboration between sky-seeking duo Spires That In The Sunset Rise and percussionist and multi-sound-machine Michael Zerang could possibly maintain such an intense pitch throughout the rest of the album. In fact the first time I heard the track I hit repeat immediately, both because it’s addictive and because I didn’t want to be let down afterwards.

I wasn’t let down at all, but that’s not because any of the five tracks that follow sound like “Child.” Zerang and STITSR wisely don’t try to reproduce that initial fervor, instead maintaining their intensity through subtlety, pace, and variety. The trio conjure all kinds of trembling ghosts through small rhythmic accents, gathering clouds of whistling and sawing and vibrating, and most importantly the vocal invention of Ka Baird and Taralie Peterson. Zerang’s presence is constant in Illinois Glossolalia, but it’s throats of STITSR that make this album so stirring, connecting the literal and the abstract so tightly yet so expansively, it’s like they’ve discovered an infinitely stretchable rubber band with which to bind those two poles.

– Marc Masters

KA BAIRD on Illinois Glossolalia

In February of 2011, Taralie and I joined forces with Michael Zerang for the first time in an event curated by Dan Mohr of Chicago called “Collision Theory” where musicians were paired with dancers for the first time in a live setting. We had been talking with Michael about some kind of collaboration and this seemed like the perfect opportunity to try something new and improvisation-based together. We had so much FUN at this event (we were paired with Kristina Fluty and Dancers) that we decided immediately afterwards to keep experimenting with each other.  That year we went on to perform several times and completed a residency at Experimental Sound Studio in Chicago where the material for Illinois Glossolalia was recorded. 

2011-2013 were big years of improv for Spires as we sought to break through certain expectations of what we thought our music should be or who we thought we were as musicians.  Ultimately, we sought to annihilate ourselves. Through “welcoming” failure and thereby liberating ourselves from form/structure or any notion of good/bad, we were able to reach a point where performances became a catharsis and absolute enjoyment. Since then Spires (and I) have gone through periods of heavier refinement but that sense of joy and liberation through performance has remained.  Illinois Glossolalia remains a testament to that pure creative spirit. Thank you Michael for the adventure! Here’s to more in the future.

Abjects—Never Give Up (Yippee Ki Yay)

Never Give Up by Abjects

Punk rock is the common language for this globe-hopping threesome, the singer/guitarist Noemi hailing from Spain, bassist Yuki from Japan and Alice, the drummer, from Spain. Their slash-and-bang aggression softens, just a bit, in tight, dizzy harmonies in cuts like the title and “Long Way to Go.” Others, including the single, “The Storm” stutter and swagger on hard staccato foundations, while sweetening the pot with all-hands vocals. This is basic stuff, executed with a certain amount of flair and skill and broken by occasional blistering, shreddy not-exactly-class-of-1979 guitar solos. All three members have spent time in the U.K. and have strong opinions on EU membership. Their “Fuck Brexit” rampages and rolls in rapid-fire repugnance, with a snarling tangle of guitars, a tom-tom fury of drums. You might hear hints of Reading Rainbow and Grass Widow in the vocal-centered cuts, but “Awake” is pure, four-slashing, garage punk, a la L7 and the Ramones, but with a tiny bit of an accent.

Jennifer Kelly

 Ayyur — The Lunatic Creature (Sentient Ruin Laboratories) 

The Lunatic Creature by Ayyur

“Lugubrious Fields” is the first and most interesting track on The Lunatic Creature, a new EP by Tunisian black metal act Ayyur. Like the other songs on the tape, “Lugubrious Fields” is driven by layered guitar riffs that crackle and buzz with anxious menace. Melody manages to cut through the guitars’ miasmatic fog, and vocals, supplied by bandleader and songwriter Angra Mainyu, growl and whither, emerging and disappearing back into the thick mix. Much of the track lingers at midtempo, held there by the riffs’ accumulated power. Don’t let the relatively exotic sound of the phrase “Tunisian black metal” fool or titillate you — this is pretty conventional stuff, evocative by turns of the USBM Cascadian movement and then of tougher, more orthodox acts like Aosoth (and it should be noted that former Deathspell Omega vocalist Shaxul provides drums on this record). But if midtempo black metal is your thing, this tape is worth a listen.  

Jonathan Shaw

 Dawn — New Breed (Local Action)

new breed by DAWN

Goldenheart was the record that put her on the map, Blackheart got all the attention and Redemption was the overly long attention-getter, but the more I listen to New Breed, the more I think this is the record Dawn Richard was meant to make. It’s not a pristinely polished pop production a la Goldenheart or anything Janelle Monáe’s done since The ArchAndroid (though it likely won’t surprise you to learn that Monáe reached out to Richard last year either because of or as an inspiration for the latter’s cover of “Pynk”), and it’s not the purely synthetic club constructions of Redemption or the Infrared EP; if anything, this is a little disjointed and sloppy – song transitions can be fairly abrupt and the sonic arc can zig and zag across R&B, funk, soul and pop with political sutures loosely keeping the theme. But it holds together just enough to be her most exciting album, and certainly the one with the most potential for a wider listenership than just futurist R&B enthusiasts. Put another way: It’ll be a travesty if you don’t hear “Dreams and Converse” playing from every bodega, bank lobby and beat-up SUV in five months.  

Patrick Masterson

DenMother — Past Life (Counting on Downstairs)

“Face,” the opening track of now-Fredericton (by way of Toronto) based DenMother’s new record both marks the end of a busy year (2018 saw releases in January, June, and here December) and exhibits a contrast that gets right to what makes Sabarah Pilon’s work under the name always compelling. The first sound you hear is a lilting melody of what sounds like a synthesizer trying to sing like a person; before too long, it’s joined and almost (but not quite) overwhelmed by a more obviously machine-based blare of sound, a thickly sliding, grinding tone. It might sound like those elements are incompatible, or that they wouldn’t mesh well with the song DenMother sings over them, but the result feels perfectly natural. And if “Face” makes for a great example of the kind of music DenMother’s been making for years now, Past Life also shows some new dynamics and approaches, whether it’s the bereft upright bass-and-voice intro to “All Black” or the more heavily textured, submerged songcraft of “Not a Likely Story.” Past Life features both, in the form of the guitar reverb and vocal refrain duo of “The Desert,” one of the starkest DenMother songs and, in the warmly embracing and emotional ambiguous “Fish Cars,” maybe the best example of her ‘classic’ sound in a year or two. Here’s hoping for a similarly active 2019 from one of Canada’s best hidden treasures.

Ian Mathers

 Etran de L'Aïr — No. 1 (Sahel Sounds)

No. 1 by Etran de L'Aïr

In the decade or so since Tinariwen broke through in Europe and the US, there’s been such a glut of Saharan records that it’s easy to miss a real stunner when it comes out. Easier still when said stunner is by a budget wedding band from Agadez and released by the prolific boutique label, Sahel Sounds. If you also missed Etran de L'Aïr’s No. 1 when it came out last year, don’t wait any longer to pick up one of 2018’s most dopamine releasing LPs. Recorded live outside the band/family’s home in front of an ecstatic crowd, Etran’s music, with its flashy but oh-so-sweet interlocking guitar lines and unwillingness to let a good groove go to waste, sounds like a stripped-down, scrappy, North African garage rock version of Congolese soukous. After the throat-clearing first track, they never touch the ground. Pure pleasure. Highest recommendation.

Isaac Olson

 Ex-Display Model— Ex-Display Model (Self released)

Ex-Display Model by Ex-Display Model

The fact that Ex-Display Model, as of their debut, sound a little bit like Fujiya & Miyagi isn’t a big surprise. Plenty of listeners tend to identify bands via vocalists, for one thing, and F&M’s David Best has one of the more pleasingly indelible voices in the field. And in fact, Ex-Display Model started out as a solo project for Best, before he started working with AK/DK’s Ed Chivers, so when the opening “Immaculate Rip” channels a tinge of F&M’s cool, sardonic electro-rock it’s hard to be upset by more of a good thing. But then the song channels a malfunctioning guitar pedal for a much more abrasive chorus, and this taut, sharply formed debut is off the races. Whether it’s adding Au Revoir Simone’s Annie Hart on the reflective, melancholy “Autopilot” or going slightly glam on “Swing of Things” (or, for that matter, doing one of the best straight Motorik homages in a while on “Torschlusspanik”) Ex-Display Model wind up distinguishing themselves easily from either parent project, while offering some tantalizing glimpses of where the project could go further, starting from this basis next time around. The closing title track channels the duo’s instincts towards both dense repetition and thrilling squall into a fine climax — display-ready or not, here’s hoping for more from them.  

Ian Mathers

 Foster / Young / Zerang—Bind the Hand(s) That Feed (Relative Pitch)

Bind the Hand(s) That Feed by Michael Foster / Katherine Young / Michael Zerang

Bassoonist Katherine Young and percussionist Michael Zerang first encountered New York-based tenor / soprano saxophonist Michael Foster when the latter musician came to Chicago to participate in the 2018 Exposure Series . Originally conceived as a residency to bring an out of town composer and a group of Chicagoan improvisers, that year the event played out as a sequence of encounters between local improvising musicians/presenters and their counterparts in other cities around the USA. Coming from different aesthetic corners and generations, they build out from common commitments to improvisation and extended technique. You can hear them figure out what works as the set progresses. Things start with a scrape and a rasp; Zerang loves friction, Foster sucks and gargles, and Young magnifies and distorts her instrument’s woody timbres with electronics. After an initial fractious dust-up, they pull back to explore micro-sounds, patient gestures and complementary contours. The trio collectively realizes such a fertile environment that it’d be a shame if they didn’t re-convene to see what else they can grow in it.

Bill Meyer

 Hoover / “Hoover1” 12” (Nowt Recordings)

HOOVER1 by nOWt

No DC post-hardcore, vacuum cleaners or unloved blanket-bearing presidents need apply on René Pawlowitz’s latest alias, pardon, release as Hoover. The Frankfurt producer best known as Shed (but certainly willing to go by a number of other names — just look at that list) has recently been exploring throwback rave music as a style beyond his usual triangulation of techno, house and dubstep. Unlike the 12” he put out for XL as The Higher in November, which featured prominent vocals, brash synths and uptempo percussion experiments, the Hoover vinyl is a more restrained effort. For evidence, check the almost stripped-back feel of the a-side, which uses the common trope of a distended female vocal sample before an all-enveloping astral synth swoops in around a little before the two-minute mark. But that’s as far as he’s willing to wade into these waters – the percussion holds station and remains clipped. The half-stepping b-side, meanwhile, is a sumptuous after-hours burner that arguably does less than the a-side; it almost feels like a cut better suited for the Workshop crowd. Beautiful studies in sound design and mood both, but if you were looking for something a little, er, higher, Hoover’s probably not going to get you there.

Patrick Masterson

  The Hunches — Same New Thing (Almost Ready Records)

The popular narrative attributes the heavily scare-quoted garage rock revival of the early-2000s to bands like the Strokes, the Hives, and the White Stripes. Let me tell you something, no disrespect to Jack or Pelle, but that's just fucking dumb, and you should know that. It started right here and it pretty much ended here, too. The Hunches would get louder, artier, and weirder leading up to their demise in 2009, but these previously unreleased 2002 demos (some of which would appear later in revised form, while others are completely new to the world) find the band in a raw, feral state. Hart Gledhill sound sounds like he's about to cough up a lung and rip his heart out on every song, and guitarist Chris Gunn takes aim with rapid-fire KBD riffs, drags the listener through rusted shards of post-Stooges shrapnel skronk, and then offers the necessary first-aid in the form of chiming, downright melodic leads. Same New Thing shows that while everyone else was playing "Incense and Peppermints," the Hunches had been playing "Psycho" all along.  

Nate Knaebel 

 Jovan Karcic—2015 (Scioto)

2015 by Jovan Karcic

Jovan Karcic played guitar in the agitated pop punk band Gaunt during the 1990s, and he’s currently sitting in on drums for the raucous punk band Scrawl. You might not expect his latest solo album 2015 to be as sleek and full-throatedly synthy as it is, or to recall the lush keyboard atmospheres of the Cure or the chilled funk syncopation of smooth R&B. But there it is, Karcic’s songs are gleaming, surging masses of synthethic sound, which slip from self-searching confessionalism into ambient reveries. 2015 looms much larger than your typical bedroom-recorded autonomous songwriter project, with brighter, more polished textures in service of its down-on-its-luck narrative. “Larry’s,” for instance, visits the colorless desolation of a mid-American tavern, the kind with pinball machines and pool tables and decades-old alliances scratched in initials into table tops. And yet it’s recorded in what might be the very opposite of kitchen sink realism, with booming dance-floor rhythms and thick layers of keyboard interplay and a 1970s Dire Straits-ish guitar solo erupting out of the interstices. “Lesserman,” later on, draws a contrast between the downbeaten “Lesserman” and the more successful “Betterman” who “eats breakfast with his kids, and looks them in the eyes,” and confides that, “today brings opportunities for joy.” Yet though the track intensifies when it gets to the “Betterman” verses, with massed vocals and additional electric keyboard parts, Karcic’s heart is with “Lesserman.” Maybe 2015 is “Lesserman” imagining an impossibly happy ending, lush, sweetened with keyboards, pulsing with a positive rhythm, while outside sleet needles down on dirty streets, and tomorrow is never a better day.

Jennifer Kelly  

 Eli Keszler — Stadium (Shelter Press)

Stadium by Eli Keszler

You need people to fill up a stadium, and this record sounds like just the tool to expand Eli Keszler’s audience. His past work has included kicking out the jams with Oren Ambarchi and wiring a pumping station for sound. They’re worthy endeavors, but not ones likely to pull a stadium-sized crowd, or even an audience like his recent mates Oneohtrix Point Never and Rashad Becker might draw. So Keszler has recontextualized his extraordinary percussive technique and his abiding concern with spatial sound by pairing them with more accessible sounds. The opening track “Measurement Doesn’t Change the System at All” (a claim that physicists could dispute) combines a creeping Farfisa melody and sprinting, undeniable groove. The vibraphone and bass drum on “Flying Floor for U.S. Airways” are magnified until they are as thick and plush as sofa stuffing; the patter of dryer drum and stick sounds manifests a clear focus point in an otherwise cloudy space. And while 

“Fashion of Echo” begins with a typical Keszler gambit, using rapidly and precisely articulated shifts between the different parts of the kit to suggest a three-dimensional configuration in motion, there’s more forward momentum than in the past. Stadium sounds rather like something Aphex Twin might achieve if he took up the drums.

Bill Meyer

  Kukuruz Quartet — Julius Eastman Piano Interpretations (Intakt)

Julius Eastman Piano Interpretations by Kukuruz Quartet

George Lewis’s liner notes underscore the precariousness of Julius Eastman’s profile. From promising beginnings as a performer and a composer of avant-garde classical music in the 1970s and 1980s, he spiraled into obscurity and homelessness and was almost forgotten. If not for the luck, if you can call it that, that the current concern with elevating under-heard narratives, for which Eastman certainly qualifies — black, queer, an extraordinary singer, an acutely challenging composer in an idiom more likely to borrow from people of color than to follow their lead — follows his death by only a couple decades, would he be totally forgotten? So let’s take the emergence of an album dedicated to his work by a European piano quartet as a good sign. Bright recording and exacting performances make this an easier listen that some of Eastman’s own performances, and the density made possible by the use of four grand pianos amplifies the archness of “Evil Nigger” and the spiritual aura of “Gay Guerilla.” Two less notoriously entitled pieces, a robust exercise in overlaid patterns called “Fugue no. 7” and a long, barely there exploration of the piano’s innards named “Buddha,” round out a set well worth hearing.

Bill Meyer

 loscil – Submers (Kranky)

Submers by loscil

Kranky continues their reissue program of Scott Morgan’s earlier work as loscil, bringing his second album Submers (originally released on CD in 2002) out on vinyl. loscil records tend to operate on two levels, with the immediate/visceral impact of his richly soothing and/or foreboding music (still, at this point, fairly summed up as “ambient dub”) working hand in hand with some sort of conceptual angle for both artist and listener to meditate upon. With Submers, it was submarines, including the Russian Kursk, which had recently lost all hands after a torpedo mishap during a naval exercise. While more recent releases have shown just how well Morgan can fold in the work of collaborators, on this record he’s working strictly from sample sources and composing using a custom-built sequencer, no synthesizers or acoustic instruments involved. The result is an enveloping, suitably aquatic sound world from the shimmering, gently pulsing opening track “Argonaut I” into a solid hour of engrossing deep sound. Morgan has continued to refine his work but there’s a reason Submers brought him to wider attention at the time - it’s still one of the highlights in one of the most solid discographies in ambient music.  

Ian Mathers  

 Lucille Furs — Another Land (Requieum for Un Twister)

The first thing you hear is a bassline borrowed from “Come Together,” the second a hazy overtone of keyboards and guitars. Lucille Furs, out of Chicago, are deep into a 1960s psychedelic lode, with hints of Love and the Zombies wafting through their low-key lysergic tunes. Slanty, surfy-toned guitar splinter the air in “Paint Euphrosyne Blue,” chortling organics burble up through the tune. It’s more emphatic than most of these tunes a fuzz-garage raver in line with Black Angels or the Allah-Las. Elsewhere the vibe is sleepier, but still enticing. While not exactly overstuffed—there are only five of them and the most exotic instrument is a mellotron—these songs feel plush and carefully arranged. Baroque garage pop isn’t really a category, but maybe it should be.

Jennifer Kelly

 Murderer — I Did It All for You (Toxic State)

I Did It All For You by Murderer

With just an extremely short 2013 demo to their name, Murderer went recording and came back with this 15-tracker released in the dying days of December that picks at a scab of more than just straight-ahead garage vibes: There are the gentle chimes that color the margins of “Piece of Candy”; that lazy, burned-out surf riff on “Cowboy” and “Moonlight”; the creepy dreaming of “Juicy Fruit Dream”; the slightly overbearing keyboard flourish on “A Diamond Just for You”; the fact that there are four different tracks all called “Perfect” here; and so on. Featuring commanding drum work by Sam Ryser (also of Crazy Spirit and Dawn of Humans) and guitar and vocals courtesy Hank Wood of thee Hammerheads, the thing that came to my mind after a first listen was Pink Flag-era Wire, but the taut post-punk goes in enough different directions to get you racking your brain for better analogs from the turn of the ‘80s. “I need it to be perfect / I need it to be real / That’s just how I feel” each “Perfect” intones; in its own way, it certainly is that. Great album for the fuckin’ record reviewer in your life.

Patrick Masterson

 Doug Paisley — Starter Home (No Quarter)

Starter Home by Doug Paisley

The title track of Doug Paisley’s Starter Home is the sort of perfect instant classic that most songwriters on the folk/country spectrum spend an entire career hoping they’ll write. While “Starter Home” and its autopsy of middle-class aspiration, repression and stasis could have been written anytime in the last 60 years, it has particular resonance ten years into a housing crisis that only the wealthy think is over. Nothing else here is as good as “Starter Home”, but “No Way to Know,” “Mister Wrong,” “Drinking with a Friend,” and “Waiting” come close. The other four tracks are all worth hearing at least once, too. Like Paisley’s previous records, Starter Home is a better-than-average folk record with a handful of knockouts. He’s going to have an incredible Best Of collection someday.

Isaac Olson

 Manuel Troller — Vanishing Points (three:four)

Vanishing Points by Manuel Troller

Rock dynamics shape the music that Manuel Troller makes with Schnellertollermeier. In KvG’s Bottom Orchestra, he shifts nimbly from chamber music to free improvisation to shattered chanson. But when the Swiss guitarist plays solo, it’s all about the possibilities of his gear. Troller could not get the tones he gets without a plugged-in signal chain; with it, his sounds range from feathery cirrus to fractured granite. He uses delays to freeze moments of motion, sometimes to subject them to examination and other times to use chunks of digital stutter as building blocks. This description may sound a bit clinical, but Troller has a knack for turning sound into experience. Sometimes this record feels like flight, other times like you’re stumbling around in a dark and cluttered factory space, but it never feels like a guy just fiddling with his strings and boxes. 

Bill Meyer

 Jamila Woods — “Zora” single (Jagjaguwar)

LEGACY! LEGACY! by Jamila Woods

The Zora Neale Hurston quotation I keep returning to in listening to the second single from Jamila Woods’ sophomore full-length Legacy! Legacy! is, “I love myself when I am laughing … and then again when I am looking mean and impressive.” The 29-year-old Chicagoan is exuding confidence from every pore on this three-minute track, luring you from the soft power of “I tenderly fill my enemies with white light” to the leveling of “You will know never everything, everything / I will never know everything, everything” to the outright ascension of “I may be small, I may speak soft / but you can see the change in the water.” In a word: Recognize. The gorgeous harp flourishes, sparsely echoing synths and dusty groove of the beat, accompanied with backing vocals mixed to accentuate rather than overwhelm Woods’ lead, further illustrate who is running the show here. As Hurston also once said, there are years that ask questions and years that answer; for any doubters left after 2016’s Heavn (and aren’t there always a few), May’s Legacy! Legacy! should firmly weed them out. Get ready.