Jean-Charles Richard/Marc Copland: L’étoffe des rêves (RJAL 397042)

| Tyran Grillo

Jean-Charles Richard soprano and baritone saxophones
Marc Copland piano
Claudia Solal vocals
Vincent Segal cello
Recorded and mixed in January 2022 by Gérard de Haro at Studios La Buissonne, assisted by Matteo Fontaine
Mastered by Nicolas Baillard at La Buissonne Mastering Studio
Steinway grand piano prepared and tuned by Sylvain Charles
Produced by Gérard de Haro and RJAL for La Buissonne Label and Jean Charles Richard
Release date: June 22, 2022

L’étoffe des rêves (The fabric of dreams) emerged from saxophonist Jean-Charles Richard’s quiet longing to enter into conversation with pianist Marc Copland. From that desire, almost courtly in its patience, the project gathered breath. With the addition of cellist Vincent Segal and vocalist Claudia Solal, the album assumes the shape of a suspended tapestry, light as silk yet weighted with centuries of memory. It is a gathering of hours rather than songs, of climates rather than compositions. Each piece gestures toward Richard’s devotion to literature and to a lineage of sound that includes Debussy, Mussorgsky, and Messiaen, yet never lingers in quotation. Instead, these presences are dissolved and distilled, transformed into timbre and touch, as if books and scores had been steeped in water until only their perfume remained.

“Feodor” begins in the low murmur of pizzicato and baritone saxophone, a dialogue between plucked string and breath that feels almost subterranean. The melody unfurls with a nocturnal radiance, flowering like a vine that blooms while we sleep. There is gravity here, yet it does not weigh upon the listener. It hovers, alert and watchful, as though a character from Dostoevsky had stepped from the page and found himself translated into resonance. The saxophone carries the density of a novel in its tone, its phrases circling moral abysses without falling in.

In “Giverny,” Copland’s piano becomes a garden of harmonics, petals opening beneath Richard’s soprano lines. Their vocabularies interlace without rivalry. The soprano glides in slender arcs while the piano refracts light, offering chords that seem to shimmer at their edges. One hears water, lilies, reflections breaking into abstraction. Richard’s virtuosity is neither exhibition nor display. It is a form of listening, a willingness to be altered by the piano’s spectral hues. The result feels less like improvisation and more like a shared act of painting, color seeping into color until distinctions dissolve.

Solal enters “Ophelia’s death” with a voice that seems spun from dusk. Her phrasing sways between lucidity and surrender, weaving hope with despair in a single filament. The music cradles her words without cushioning their sorrow. The melody drifts through shadows, then briefly catches a shaft of light, as if the river itself has paused to remember the sky. In “Ophélie,” now filtered through Rimbaud, Shakespeare’s heroine is not merely revived but reimagined. Piano and pizzicato cello sparkle around her like broken glass catching sunlight. The setting suggests a chamber opera stripped to its essence, drama reduced to breath, to syllable, to pulse.

“Russian Prince” opens with a soprano solo that arcs across silence in a single unbroken gesture. The piano enters as though it had been waiting in the wings of thought. A motif crystallizes from nothing, coherent from its first utterance, like a child who speaks in complete sentences before learning to walk. The title invites speculation. One might sense the echo of The Idiot, that fragile prince of compassion navigating a brutal world. Whether or not this allusion is intended matters less than the atmosphere it conjures. The music inhabits innocence without naivety, vulnerability without collapse.

Several pieces function as brief, luminous asides. “La lettre d’Isaac Babel” pairs baritone and cello in a duet that feels like correspondence across eras. The lines are spare, intimate, as though written in ink that fades even as it dries. “Light flight,” a solo for pizzicato cello, flickers past like a thought one cannot quite hold. These interludes resemble marginalia in a well-loved book, annotations that reveal as much as the main text.

The spiritual inflection of “O sacrum convivium” introduces an ambient expanse that seems to suspend time itself. Sound stretches thin, nearly transparent, yet remains charged with presence. The spoken word of the title track deepens the sense that we are overhearing rather than consuming. Each piece feels severed from its origin and reborn in vibration. Literature becomes airflow. Painting becomes a chord. Prayer becomes resonance. In this transmutation, the album achieves a rare paradox, steeped in reference while remaining wholly itself.

The closing “Weeping brook” leaves a lone baritone saxophone tracing a solitary line. It does not plead for witness. It simply exists, like water moving over stone in a forest no one has mapped. Listening becomes a private act, almost clandestine. We are less audience than eavesdropper, privy to a conversation between memory and sound.

What remains is not a catalogue of inspirations but the sensation of having stood at a threshold. Words lose their consonants and reappear as breath. Images relinquish their outlines and return as vibration. In that exchange lies a question that extends beyond this album. If stories can be sung and paintings can be heard, perhaps the boundaries we draw between forms are merely habits of perception. Perhaps meaning itself is migratory, moving from page to air to silence, asking only that we follow with attentive hearts.

Emler/Tchamitchian/Echampard: The Useful Report (RJAL 397041)

| Tyran Grillo

Andy Emler piano
Claude Tchamitchian double bass
Eric Echampard drums
Recorded and mixed by Gérard de Haro at Studios La Buissonne, assisted by Matteo Fontaine
Mastering by Nicolas Baillard at La Buissonne Mastering Studio
Steinway Grand Piano prepared and tuned by Sylvain Charles
Produced by Gérard de Haro & RJAL for La Buissonne Label and La Compagnie aime l’air
Release date: February 11, 2022

Pianist Andy Emler, bassist Claude Tchamitchian, and drummer Erich Echampard have spent more than two decades metabolizing one another’s instincts. What began as chemistry has ripened into something cellular. On this fourth recording, the self-styled “ETE” trio’s interplay feels less like conversation and more like respiration, an exchange of oxygen at the most intimate scale. They have turned toward composition with renewed devotion, shaping motifs that behave like strands of genetic code, spiraling through each piece and replicating in altered forms. The album’s title gestures toward our cultural fixation on surfaces, yet the trio answers with a plunge inward. They seek the mitochondrion rather than the mirror, the quiet engine rather than the polished facade. In doing so, they make a case for music as adenosine triphosphate, as stored light released into motion.

The phrase “polyphonic monologue” used by Raphaëlle Tchamitchian in the album’s liner notes proves uncannily apt. There are no solos in the traditional sense, no heroic cell stepping forward to claim dominion. Instead, the trio behaves as a single entity whose organs hum in cooperative tension. Each instrument pulses with a distinct timbre, yet the borders blur. The piano becomes membrane and marrow, the bass a bloodstream carrying harmonic iron, the drums a lattice of nerves firing in luminous arcs. Their unity is not homogeneity but interdependence. What one initiates, another transforms. What one relinquishes, another absorbs.

“The document” opens like a petri dish held to morning light. The bass stirs first, delicate yet intent, as if sketching the faint outline of a living form. Emler’s piano enters with subterranean warmth, rolling chords that feel like tectonic plates shifting beneath tender growth. Echampard’s cymbals shimmer into being, droplets of metallic rain, while the drums provide a pulse that suggests both heart and forge. The music gathers itself without coercion. It rises as a flame rises, by virtue of its own chemistry. The introduction is not merely dynamic but parthenogenetic.

With “The real,” urgency courses through the ensemble like an electric current seeking ground. The trio advances in braided momentum, their phrases leaning into one another, pressing toward articulation. Meaning here is discovered in the act of motion, finding a curious echo in “The fake,” where simplicity becomes revelation. Tchamitchian’s bass groove stands unadorned, almost austere, and from that clarity the others extract veins of shimmering ore. Piano figures glint as mica under sunlight. Drums trace fine filigree patterns across the muscular frame. The sculpture they erect is vast, yet its strength derives from the plainness of its foundation. Authenticity and artifice entwine, indistinguishable at the molecular level.

Even in pieces that tilt toward improvisational exposure, such as “The lies” and the two-part “Indecisions,” the trio’s commitment to structure remains palpable. Motifs are recurring dreams that are altered slightly with each iteration. Beneath the surface, one senses the flex of sinew and tendon. These are not aimless wanderings. They are the disciplined contractions of a body testing its limits. The music quivers with potential energy, poised between restraint and eruption.

Brief reflections like “The worries” function as synaptic flashes, concise yet charged. Broader statements such as “The resistant” and “The endless hopelude” unfold with a grandeur that invites the listener to nod in recognition. Through it all, the trio breathes as one. There is no arrhythmia, no faltering in the shared pulse. Their cohesion feels inevitable, as if they have tapped into a circulatory system older than themselves. By the time “No return” arrives, the listener has been carried through cycles of exertion and release. Fatigue sets in, yet it is the satisfying kind of muscles well used, of energy fully spent in meaningful labor. The closing passage offers repose, a moment when the organism settles into equilibrium.

What lingers after the final resonance fades is not merely admiration for technical prowess or compositional craft. One is left contemplating the strange fact that life depends on ceaseless transformation. Cells die so others may thrive. Energy dissipates even as it sustains. This trio reminds us that depth is not a static reservoir but a process, a burning at the core that cannot be seen directly yet animates every gesture. Perhaps authenticity lies not in the surface or the hidden interior, but in the flow between them. In that current, we recognize ourselves as both fragile and inexhaustible, flickers of stored sunlight seeking form in the dark.

Bill Carrothers/Vincent Courtois: Firebirds (RJAL 397040)

| Tyran Grillo

Bill Carrothers piano
Vincent Courtois cello
Eric Séva baritone saxophone on tracks 6 and 7
Recording, mixing, and mastering at Studios La Buissonne, Pernes-les-Fontaines, France
Recorded May 21 and mixed June 21, 2021, by Gérard de Haro, assisted by Matteo Fontaine
Steinway grand piano tuned by Alain Massonneau
Mastered by Nicolas Baillard
Produced and directed by Gérard de Haro & RJAL for La Buissonne Label
Release date: November 12, 2021

Firebirds is many things, but above all, an act of faith. Gérard de Haro, long a quiet architect of improbable encounters in his La Buissonne studio, had carried within him the intuition that pianist Bill Carrothers and cellist Vincent Courtois belonged in the same current. Each had left an imprint on the room’s air in separate sessions, as if their sounds were tributaries waiting for confluence. Yet they had never tested the tensile strength of their voices against one another. Courtois has confessed that without de Haro’s conviction, the meeting might have remained hypothetical. Trust became the catalyst. Trust in the ear behind the glass, trust in the unseen geometry of chance. What followed feels less like a collaboration than a tide answering the pull of a distant moon.

Indeed, despite the album’s title, it is water that courses through it by temperament. The frame is Egberto Gismonti’s “Aqua y Vinho,” placed at the threshold and the farewell. The cello begins alone, tracing the melody as though drafting a map across an empty sea. Its lines appear rectilinear at first, crystalline and deliberate, then soften, bending into arcs that suggest eddies and hidden inlets. When the piano joins, it does not so much accompany as set the shoreline in motion. Its chords fall with the measured cadence of footsteps along wet sand, insistent yet patient. Courtois responds with widening spirals of sound, ascending in vaporous abstraction before returning, each time altered, to the melody’s wellspring. The repetition never repeats. It accumulates.

The improvised title track arrived first in the studio, though it appears later in sequence, as if the musicians wished to let it steep before offering it whole. The title track smolders with a folk-inflected sorrow, embers glowing beneath a veil of restraint. Carrothers coaxes from the piano a warmth that suggests hearthlight flickering on stone walls. Courtois answers with phrases that hover between lament and lullaby, a bowed murmur that seems to remember something older than language. Their interplay suggests two elements seeking equilibrium, flame reflected on water, each transfiguring the other’s hue.

Standards such as “Deep Night” and “Isfahan” are treated as living aquifers. “Isfahan” opens into a spacious dusk, the arrival of guest musician Eric Séva’s baritone saxophone deepening the horizon. His tone spreads like ink in water, dark yet translucent, amplifying the nocturnal hush that permeates the record. The trio does not crowd the melody; they breathe around it, allowing space to function as tidepool and threshold. “Deep Night” shimmers with restraint, its contours revealed slowly, as if the musicians were polishing a stone discovered at low tide.

Even Joni Mitchell’s “The Circle Game” undergoes a gentle metamorphosis. Pizzicato cello skips like pebbles across a pond while the piano lays down chords that ripple outward in concentric rings. The familiar refrain acquires a different gravity here, less nostalgic than reflective, as though time were not a wheel but a river whose surface records every passing cloud.

The original compositions widen the estuary. “Colleville-sur-Mer” unfolds in a hush that feels tidal, grief receding and returning with unbidden regularity. “San Andrea” keens with a salt-etched intensity, its phrases cresting in plaintive arcs. “The Icebird” introduces a glacial clarity, tones refracted as if through frozen air, while “1852 mètres plus tard” paints in gradients of altitude and atmosphere, suggesting ascent through thinning light. Throughout, de Haro’s production captures not only the notes but the air between them, that charged interval where sound prepares to become something else.

To speak of transfiguration here is not mere embellishment. The album enacts it. Themes dissolve and reassemble, melodies shift from solid ground to liquid shimmer, textures ignite and cool. Each musician remains unmistakably himself, yet the encounter alters their outlines. The music seems to ask whether identity is ever fixed or always in the process of becoming, shaped by the streams it consents to enter. Perhaps art works similarly, eroding certainty, polishing rough edges, carving new channels in the bedrock of perception. If so, the true transfiguration may occur not within the notes themselves but within the listener, who steps into those same streams and discovers, upon emerging, that the shoreline has shifted.

Vincent Lê Quang: Everlasting (RJAL 397038)

| Tyran Grillo

Vincent Lê Quang saxophones
Bruno Ruder piano
John Quitzke drums
Guido Zorn double bass
Recording, mixing, and mastering, Studios La Buissonne, Pernes-les-Fontaines, France
Recorded December 2019 and Mixed February 2020 by Gérard de Haro
Mastered by Nicolas Baillard at La Buissonne Mastering Studio
Steinway grand piano tuned and prepared by Sylvain Charles
Produced by Gérard de Haro and RJAL for La Buissonne label
Release date: May 21, 2021

Everlasting announces the leader debut of Vincent Lê Quang with a quiet assurance that feels anything but declarative. There is no display of ego here, no virtuosic flourish meant to dazzle. Instead, the album reveals a rarer mastery that effaces itself in service of listening. Lê Quang’s soprano and tenor do not dominate the space so much as inhabit it, breathing alongside pianist Bruno Ruder, drummer John Quitzke, and bassist Guido Zorn in a shared atmosphere where composition and improvisation dissolve into one another. What emerges is a music that seems already ancient, yet continually being born in the present.

This clarity of purpose stems from 12 years of collective life, the quartet bound by a mutual attentiveness that allows each piece to function as a portal to a clearer understanding of the self. Lê Quang speaks of his compositions as keys to a common state, and that metaphor becomes audible across the record. Each track opens a different interior landscape, yet all are connected by a shared commitment to the risk of being fully together in sound. Gérard de Haro’s production deepens this sense of communion, letting the music breathe within the luminous acoustics of Studios La Buissonne, where every resonance carries memory and every silence feels charged with possibility.

The album begins with an environment. In “L’odeur du buis,” piano and drums murmur from beneath the surface while the soprano rises gently into the night air, suspended above an arco bass that glows with lunar patience. Rather than announcing a theme, the piece slowly gathers a climate, a scent of darkness, foliage, and open sky. From this opening terrain, “La fugueuse” moves forward with subtle propulsion, water passing over unseen stones, the band drifting deeper into a current that neither rushes nor rests. These two tracks form a single act of arrival, a descent into the world the album will inhabit.

From there, the music shifts toward flowering and fracture. “Fleur” reveals some of the band’s most delicate interplay, cymbals shimmering with glasslike detail while Zorn’s bass traces a folk-tinged modal path. The group moves as one organism, loose at the edges yet inseparable at the core. This sense of collective breath reaches its most expansive form in “Everlasting,” a ballad built on tremor. Quitzke’s drumming hints at subterranean movement while piano, bass, and reed hold to a semblance of order, a belief that time can be counted. Gradually, that belief unravels. Flow becomes the governing principle of a rising density that never tips into excess, only into gravity.

A quieter inward turn follows. “Novembre” unfolds with the slowness of a season retracting into itself. This introspection deepens in “Une danse pour Wayne,” which refuses dance in favor of drift. Piano and drums speak in a near-telepathic dialogue, light touching darkness and returning transformed. Lê Quang’s soprano hovers above them, trembling with life yet strangely disembodied. Where these pieces search inward, “À rebours” stretches alone, a piano tendon extending between bone and air, longing without consolation.

The album then tilts toward the uncanny. “Dans la boîte à clous tous les clous sont tordus” begins with a solitary soprano that slowly gathers companions, the music assembling itself piece by piece. Tension accumulates, an electric expectancy that never resolves into release, and the listener is left suspended between dread and wonder. That unsettled feeling grows in “Le rêve d’une île,” a land that appears solid only to shift beneath the feet, and in “Rayon violet,” where breath rides atop shimmering harmonics, drawing a luminous arc through darkness.

With “Unaccounted-for pasts,” Lê Quang moves to tenor and opens a deeper register of uncertainty. The sound becomes cavernous, filled with echoes of memory that cannot be named. The album touches collective anxiety without ever becoming rhetorical, transforming fear into a shared vibration that binds the quartet more tightly together.

“Everlast” arrives not as a conclusion but as a threshold. The music hovers at the edge of sleep, brushing the listener with a tenderness that feels neither like a farewell nor a promise, simply a moment of contact. Consciousness thins, time loosens, and the sounds hover between presence and disappearance.

What this music ultimately gives is a space held in common, a quiet breathing room where listening becomes a form of companionship. Everlasting suggests a practice of attention that carries us beyond our habitual divisions of past and present, self and other, motion and stillness. In that quiet recognition lies its lasting power, an invitation to inhabit the space between knowing and listening, where meaning reveals itself on its own time.

Jeremy Lirola: Mock the Borders (RJAL 397036)

| Tyran Grillo

Jeremy Lirola double bass
Denis Guivarc’h alto saxophone
Maxime Sanchez piano, keyboards
Nicolas Larmignat drums
Recording, mixing, and mastering, Studios La Buissonne, Pernes-les-Fontaines, France
Recorded and mixed in June 2021 by Gérard de Haro
Mastered by Nicolas Baillard at La Buissonne Mastering Studio
Steinway grand piano tuned and prepared by Alain Massonneau
Produced by La Poulie Production & Gérard de Haro and RJAL for La Buissonne Label
Release date: October 8, 2021

On the heels of 2016’s Uptown Desire, Jeremy Lirola steps beyond the grid of New York City and into a wider, less mapped territory, exchanging subway tunnels for constellations. The shift feels less like a change of scenery than a recalibration of conscience. Lirola is listening deeper, sketching a music that resists the gravitational pull of imitation. Building on the spirit of Ornette Coleman’s Harmolodics, he cultivates individuality with the patience of someone tending rare seeds in a storm-blown garden. Creativity here becomes a quiet counterforce to a world that profits from sameness, speed, and surveillance, a reminder that difference can be a form of justice. Joined by alto saxophonist Denis Guivarc’h, pianist Maxime Sanchez, and drummer Nicolas Larmignat, Lirola assembles not just a band but a small republic of attentiveness, each member accountable to the others and to the air they share. Together they construct music that feels open as a plaza yet grounded like a hearth, spacious enough to wander and steady enough to return to.

The album opens with “Mock the Lines,” a room freshly burnished for arrival, its shine inviting reflection without vanity. The track feels both ceremonial and intimate, as though the listener is being asked to shed shoes and preconceptions. From this polished threshold, the group glides into “Living Symbols,” where groove sits in a warm pocket that is physical, spiritual, and conspiratorial all at once. Sanchez’s keyboards spread color like slow daylight across a floor, while Guivarc’h’s alto illuminates hidden corners. The quartet flows naturally into “Danced Border,” a piece that toys with the very idea of boundaries. Sanchez’s pianism ripples with curiosity over a rhythm that knows how to sway without surrendering its footing. The melodic convergence at the end is a sly reminder that lines are made to be questioned, crossed, and occasionally turned into song.

At this point, the record begins to behave like a set of ethical parables told in sound, sometimes laconic, sometimes luxuriant, always purposeful. “Sensitive Border” leads seamlessly into the expansive “Ghost Dance,” where Lirola’s bass takes on the role of a traveling griot with stories tucked into every string. The latter track hovers between what is seen and what is whispered. Keyboards shimmer like memory about to become myth, while alto moves like a shadow figure, keeping careful watch on every phrase. Rather than a detour, this stretch feels like the album’s moral heart, a meditation on how history lingers, how wounds speak, and how music might listen back.

Midway through, the record blooms into a four-part chain of color impressions. “Red” arrives as glittering dawn, full of resolve without aggression. “Black” follows like an echoing supernova, vast, humming, and strangely tender in its immensity. “White” drifts in as a partial eclipse, bright but uncertain, clarity touched by doubt, while “Yellow” closes the sequence in a twinkling dream that refuses to wake too quickly. Taken together, these pieces suggest that resistance to darkness is never one shade but many, a spectrum of feeling that glows differently at every hour.

The album then gathers itself for its final movement. “Essai éternel” arrives like a love letter that slowly turns into a ritual, affection melting into collective motion, devotion disguised as dance. It is both intimate and communal, a groove that feels like care made audible. From there, “Mock the End Lines” eases the listener toward silence with graceful tact, buttering the bread of finality just enough so that the meal feels complete without overfeeding the moment.

What we are left with is not a protest but a gentle reimagining of how the world might sound if kindness were taken seriously. Lirola offers no sermons, only evidence that beauty can nudge brutality aside, that listening can be a form of courage, and that music can rehearse the habits of a more humane future.

Tamio Shiraishi: Sora

| Tyran Grillo

Sky, the sleeve insists. A promise of lift, blue, vapor, and horizon. Yet the sound arrives caked in soil, fingernails packed with loam, lungs full of iron filings. Sora speaks upward only to burrow downward. The heavens here feel subterranean, a firmament made of shale and pressure.

Seven pieces, titled with the Japanese equivalent of “A, B, C, D, E, F, G,” as if language has been stripped to scaffolding and left in a field to rust. Tamio Shiraishi treats the saxophone less as an instrument than excavation device. He does not play notes. He drills, siphons, and fractures. Two dialects coil around each other through the record, twin serpents sharing a single ribcage.

The opening shriek is a filament of sound stretched past mercy. It reads as violence at first contact, yet something in its extremity resembles benediction. A tear across the canvas of listening. One learns more about oneself in the flinch than in the pitch itself. Inside the cavern of ISSUE Project Room, Shiraishi lowers the bell into the dark and hoists up tones so narrow they resemble slivers of light under a locked door. Microintervals shimmer like insects trapped in amber. The saxophone forgets its lineage and becomes a wind tunnel lined with nerves.

These pieces graze the border of audibility. They do not ask to be heard in the usual sense. They haunt the periphery, collecting the chaff of abandoned frequencies, gleaning scraps from farms long since swallowed by dust. Listening turns agricultural. One reaps what the wind has misplaced.

Five subsequent tracks emerge from Thousand Caves in Queens, the studio name alone a premonition of the sonic ores being mined therein. Electronics enter as a brutal accomplice. Reverb collapses into something closer to bone. The altissimo still cuts deep, though now it presses against the ear with intimate insistence, breath fogging the glass between body and speaker. Interventions of wire, distortion, and circuitry feel extra-corporeal, as if the saxophone has grown a second spine made of copper.

There are moments that detonate in miniature, pocket-sized cataclysms recalling the scorched density of Merzbow yet compacted into pellets. They surge without regard for comfort. A geyser with no interest in its spectators. In response, Shiraishi dips into sub-tone murmurs, wind turned inward, a heat that grazes the skin from beneath. Air becomes flame, cheeks raw from its lick.

Even the brief shortest piece carries a gravitational pull, dense as a star imploding in private. It circles itself, a bird trapped inside its own dream of flight, wingbeats echoing until the sky folds and the ground rushes up like an answer.

The final track returns to reverberant space, though not as repetition. More like a figure tracing its outline in ash. A search for origin without nostalgia. The sound follows its own shadow, lengthening, thinning, until walking ceases to be possible. Where it falls dead is where it belongs.

Sora is available from Relative Pitch Records here.

Tamio Shiraishi: Subway Stations in Queens

| Tyran Grillo

Japanese saxophonist and underground luminary Tamio Shiraishi has carved out an inimitable niche for himself in the literal underground of New York City, the subway system of which has served as his performance space of choice for three decades. On this release, recorded at 67th Avenue and 63rd Drive in Queens, he burrows into the ear. The stations breathe around him. Trains arrive with the force of verdicts, depart with the hush of unfinished sentences. His altissimo pierces the air, which answers back in drafts and rattles. Steel sings. Concrete keeps count. The MetroCard becomes a tarot card, each swipe a prophecy of descent.

Eight tracks, eight apertures cut into the city’s ribcage. He coaxes something feral from the lockboxes of the psyche, something that refuses to remain archived. What at first feels abrasive becomes a form of acupuncture, needles of tone pricking the skin of habit until sensation floods back into limbs gone numb from routine commute. The ear flinches, then kneels.

His high register does not merely squeal. It drafts a constitution for frequencies that have never been granted citizenship. The tiled corridors convert into echo chambers of civic unrest. Flesh recedes. Circuits awaken. The saxophone becomes a filament glowing against the damp. Sound migrates through the tunnels like current searching for a body.

There are moments when the instrument bucks against the machinery, a caged voltage refusing containment. He wrestles the rails for jurisdiction over the present tense. Each cry is a summons. Each tremor a subpoena. The heart hears what the ear resists. This is not noise as nuisance. It is noise as notice. A reminder that beneath every timetable lies a graveyard of cancelled futures.

Justice flickers in these passages, cracked like ballast underfoot. Announcements collapse into phonemes, then into static, then into a slurry of intention and erasure. Language gets mugged by reverb. Meaning falls between platform and train. Shiraishi lifts it out with breath that feels rationed, precious, almost political in its insistence on continuing.

When he pauses, the silence does not soothe. It gapes. The station inhales with him. In those held breaths, the true ache surfaces. The city reveals its pulse as arrhythmic, tired, still stubborn. The screeching that once felt punitive now reads as prayer. A subterranean psalm pitched past comfort, past compliance.

Direct contact with a passing train ignites him. He answers its thunder with serrated ribbons of tone, midwifing a birth that happens between arrivals and departures. Whether the acoustics bloom or bruise, there remains a cavernous quality to the unfolding. Every note ricochets off tile and bone alike. The more one listens, the more a covert melody materializes, a fugitive tune hiding in plain hearing. What once felt like rupture begins to resemble release.

Toward the end, the textures grow denser, more derailed. Headspace cracks open like a skylight smashed from below. The final track stages a duet between time and space that refuses settlement. Neither wins. Both testify. The saxophone presses its case until the walls sweat condensation.

Then, as another train barrels through, the horn thins, frays, threads itself into the dark seam of the tunnel. The city reclaims its own acoustics. The platform returns to routine. A last filament of tone flickers, rides the rails into blackness, and keeps going, farther down the line, past the map, past the final stop, dwindling into a vanishing point that hums, and is gone.

Subway Stations in Queens is available from Café OTO here.

HÜM: Don’t Take It So Personally

| Tyran Grillo

HÜM moves with the quiet conviction that composition and improvisation are not opposing forces but twin currents in the same river. Pianist Bojan Marjanović, bassist Bjørnar Kaldefoss Tveite, and drummer Magnus Sefaniassen Eide approach each piece as both blueprint and excavation. Themes arrive as seeds, small melodic cells set carefully in the soil. What grows from them is shaped in real time, yet nothing feels accidental. Even at its most vaporous, the trio’s language carries the imprint of design.

“Dream Beliefs” opens the album as a threshold rather than a statement. Its textures shimmer with a submerged luminosity, gentle yet insistent. There is a sense of memory suspended beneath the surface, glacial fragments drifting through warmer currents. The music feels aware of time’s double exposure. Youthful wonder lingers, yet it has been tempered by experience, by the quiet knowledge that revelation is rarely loud.

On “Kringsjå blå,” a delicate tension governs the exchange. The bass enters with a humility that conceals its strength, shaping space rather than claiming it. Tveite’s solo unfolds in restrained lyricism, each note placed with a sculptor’s patience. Marjanović responds with a piano voice that seems to tunnel into memory itself, carving chambers where nostalgia gathers and resonates. Eide’s cymbals flicker at the periphery, catching light and scattering it across shifting meters. The trio etches emotional calligraphy into the shoreline of the piece, knowing that erosion is part of the art.

The title track deepens this meditation. Its groove settles into intimacy, sincere and unguarded. It feels almost ceremonial, as if casting impressions into wet sand, preserving them for a moment before the tide returns. Marjanović’s pianism here possesses an extraordinary fluency. His lines arc and return, tracing parabolic shapes that suggest both ascent and reflection.

“After Hours” narrows the focus. The rim taps of the drums glow in the foreground, tactile and close. The kick drum recedes, the bass anchors softly, and the piano threads its way through hushed terrain. The intimacy borders on confessional. Each gesture feels whispered directly into the ear. The trio resists drama, choosing instead to cultivate atmosphere.

In “Sedmaya,” the music opens a sealed chamber of recollection. The groove interlocks with playful intricacy, the bass and piano circling one another in spirals of suggestion. Eide’s drumming introduces subtle turns that redirect the current without breaking it. The recording itself seems to glow from within, resonant and nocturnal. There is an undercurrent of longing here, a recognition that memory is both fragile and generative. The musicians do not attempt to recreate the past. They allow it to shimmer and dissolve, then build anew from its residue.

“Day Dreamer” begins with a crystalline piano introduction, each note suspended in patient clarity. The surface is calm, inviting the imagination to wander. As the piece unfolds, its apparent simplicity reveals deeper intricacies. The bass rises into a solo that sings just at the edge of awareness, hovering between articulation and suggestion. Every phrase feels necessary.

“Peculiar Being” shifts the energy. The bass sets a rocking foundation that propels forward with understated momentum. There is a locomotive spirit here, yet it is guided by tenderness rather than force. Marjanović’s solo surges with oceanic breadth, exploring registers with fearless curiosity. Eide’s cymbals and snare weave a rhythmic tapestry that both supports and provokes. The music twists back upon itself in stepwise motions, generating tension that resolves through trust.

“Arctic Ice” introduces arco bass, with a tone that is austere yet luminous. The expanse feels vast, almost ascetic, until warmth begins to seep through the cracks. The trio navigates this terrain with patience, allowing cold and heat to coexist. From this clarity emerges “Cvekje cafnalo,” a hearth after distance. The piece gathers strength without aggression, building toward a crescendo that retains softness at its core. The blade is dulled by compassion.

For listeners attuned to ECM streams, this album will resonate deeply. It shares a lineage with the introspective yet expansive elegance of Bobo Stenson and the lyrical restraint of Tord Gustavsen, yet HÜM’s voice remains distinctly its own. Their sensibility is a climate to be inhabited, one in which light and shadow converse without hierarchy. The blurred boundary between the predetermined and the spontaneous becomes a philosophy of living.

Don’t Take It So Personally ultimately proposes that music can be an act of gentle revision. Each piece reshapes experience, sanding down harsh edges while preserving essential contours, proof that identity itself may be composed in this way, through attentive listening to the spaces between what we expect and what arrives.

Caustic Reverie: Transit Signals

| Tyran Grillo

For his 27th transmission under the moniker Caustic Reverie, Bryn Schurman opens a pressure hatch beneath the psyche and invites us to descend without a tether. The result is a series of gravitational events, each bending perception until the mind forgets which way is inward.

“Transit of Iapetus” arrives like an eclipse that has forgotten its sun. The opening tones hover in a suspended hush, as if sound itself has chosen to kneel before crossing a forbidden threshold. Its frequencies seem older than the idea of time as a straight line. They move with the patience of tectonic thought, burrowing into the private chambers of awareness where instinct hovers, dormant and luminous.

Listening becomes an act of exposure. We realize how fragile the architecture of the self truly is. We exist beneath the illusion of coherence, believing ourselves to be stable forms in a navigable cosmos, yet Schurman reveals the dreamlike viscosity of our movements. Each gesture lingers longer than its intention. Each emotional tremor sends ripples beyond the horizon of consequence. We are stretched thin across existence, a filament of atoms trembling between dimensions, radiant and precarious.

“PSR B1913+16” widens the aperture. It pulses with distant radiance, the kind that travels for millennia before grazing the skin of perception. A single ray of light becomes a biography of exile. By the time it touches us, it has been severed from its birthplace, orphaned by distance and duration. We cradle that light without knowing its original name. In this way, we are less observers than vessels of matter waiting to be kissed by something that has wandered across impossible expanses.

Schurman’s digital hush carries a deceptive serenity. On the surface, the textures shimmer with tranquil restraint. Beneath that calm lies a compressed ferocity, a spirit capable of eruption yet choosing to remain coiled in discipline. It is the silence before a supernova that never announces itself, intensity distilled to a whisper that vibrates the bones more profoundly than any roar.

The album suggests that perception itself is a narrow corridor carved through an immeasurable field. We are granted only slivers of pattern, fragments of constellations, hints of geometry in the sky. “Quantum Interference Lensing” pushes further into distortion, where refraction becomes revelation. What appears solid in illustration evaporates in lived experience. The unseen becomes essential, the safety net of oxygen, gravity, and coherence, all taken for granted until absence tightens around the throat. Schurman seems to argue that catastrophe is rarely loud. It is incremental, almost tender. A slow forgetting of the forces that sustain us. A quiet suffocation within our own assumptions.

When “Collapse of Rigel” surges into the foreground, hope does not vanish in spectacle. It erodes. The track drifts like debris expelled from an airlock, spinning in a silence too vast for prayer. This is not drama. It is inevitability. The requiem is not sung for a single body but for the idea of permanence itself. Reflection multiplies reflection until identity becomes a hall of mirrors stripped of silver. We stare into ourselves and find watercolor remnants, pigment drained from the page, form barely clinging to contour.

Yet within this apparent desolation lies a fierce philosophical clarity. If we are only momentary configurations of dust and algorithm, then our fragility is our miracle. We are the brief interval in which the universe becomes aware of its own turbulence.

Instead of delivering us back to ourselves, the album performs a subtler transmutation. It suggests that consciousness is a corridor of stellar residues in which the act of listening is synonymous with curiosity. In that realization, the terror of insignificance collapses into astonishment. We are not stranded in the dark. We are the dark learning to articulate itself in flashes of awareness.