Matthew Pepitone - MP3 (Jollies)
MP3 is the latest album by Matthew Pepitone, co-founder of Pearsoll Peak. This new work, a captivating successor to MP2, ushers in a lush world of ambient soundscapes, resonating with the fluidity and rich textures of untamed terrain.
Nfaly Diakité - Hunter Folk Vol 1: Tribute to Toumani Koné (Mieruba - ML)
Born in 1989 in Bamako, Mali, Nfaly Diakité is a member of the Donsow, Bambara animist hunters. Nfaly Diakité is named after his grandfather, the late Nfaly Diakité, one of Mali’s most respected donso chiefs.
Tribute to Toumani Koné is Nfay Diakité’s first solo album, recorded in Bamako in June 2020. On the album, Nfaly is the only singer, providing backing vocals and playing the donso ngoni and keregne. The album is a tribute to the storyteller and poet Toumani Koné, the greatest donso ngoni player since N’gonifo Bourama.
Nídia & Valentina - Estradas (Latency)
Drummer-composer and multi-instrumentalist Valentina Magaletti’s explorative percussions join Afro-Portuguese artist Nídia’s singular beat-making for an exciting new collaboration in dance music. From the first beat, listeners are drawn into a world where rhythm reigns supreme and movement is inevitable. The album explores a diverse yet universal musical language through syncopated drum patterns, pulsating marimba lines, and melodic interludes.
Purple Decades - Fraction of Centuries (Beacon Sound)
When pianist and producer Tristan Eckerson initiated his Purple Decades project several years ago he was seeking to expand his range as an artist by experimenting with new textures and creating an expansive zone of contemplation for his listeners. His sophomore album as Purple Decades, Fraction of Centuries, refines the approach he took with his critically-acclaimed debut, accentuating the naturalistic qualities of his signature sound while maintaining a dialogue of sorts between stasis and movement.
Rob Mazurek - Exploding Star Orchestra - Live at the Adler Planetarium (International Anthem)
The Exploding Star Orchestra is Rob Mazurek’s vehicle for blowing minds and reshaping worlds. For more than a decade and a half, the multi-instrumentalist has guided the variably configured big band through appearances on three continents. Its first performance in his former hometown of Chicago in more than five years determined to be more than just a concert. With support from the city’s Experimental Sound Studio and International Anthem, the Exploding Star Orchestra not only played music from the new Lightning Dreamers LP, but Mazurek and Co. also showed the processes behind its creation.
Sarah Davachi - The Head As Form’d In The Crier’s Choir (Late Music)
The seven compositions on this album, written between 2022 and 2024, form a conceptual suite and an observance of the mental dances that we construct to understand acts of passage; the ways that we commune and memorialize and carry symbols back into the world beyond representation.
Tiago Sousa - A Thousand Strings (Discrepant)
A self-explanatory title in itself, 'A Thousand Strings' drifts fluidly into a celestial realm of cascading melodies and cycling patterns that never feel forced or strict throughout its two hypnotic tracks. Pulsating with life and ecstatic abandon. Taking cues from the tradition of American minimalists like Steve Reich and, particularly, Terry Riley, the Portuguese composer's work flows with a life of his own, that, while acknowledging those influences, transcends them into his own signature.
Wakuénai (Curripaco) - Music for Shape-Shifters: Field Recordings from the Amazonian Lowlands, 1981-1985 (Sublime Frequencies)
In the early 80s, an anthropologist named Jonathan Hill (1954-2023) left his recording equipment and tapes behind in a remote Wakuénai (Curripaco) village along the Upper Río Negro in Venezuela. When he returned almost a year later, he discovered that the village headman and his sons had used the equipment to record 12 hours of tape documenting a bewildering array of local narrative and musical genres – sacred chants, place-names, spirit languages, and, as featured here, the astonishing and mesmerizing sounds of trumpet and flute ensembles. Recorded in a wide range of settings – during all-night sessions in and around the village, while paddling on the river by canoe, and at various locations deep in the surrounding forest, including the mythical homes of the ancestors and animal spirits, these tapes are not only a stunning artifact of indigenous ethnomusicology, they also reveal the deep connection between sound and the shape-shifting animism of Wakuénai (Curripaco) society.
Zeno van den Broek, HIIIT, Gagi Petrovic & Machines - Relatum (MFR Contemporary Series/Moving Furniture Records)
Relatum features two compositions revolving around the relationship and interplay between the human and the algorithmic, bringing together musicians and artificial performers.
