If you’ve been following my musical wanderings for some time, you may know that my all-time favorite band is Mediavolo from France. I recently had the honor of providing liner notes for their Blade Runner-inspired ode to 80s synthpop, Unvisible Science. Click the album cover to listen and read.
Artists often draw their deepest language from the places that first shaped their ears. For Lucian Ban, Mat Maneri, and John Surman, those places lie far apart geographically, culturally, and temperamentally. Yet, they converge in a shared devotion to improvisation and to the long memory carried by folk and classical traditions. Each musician arrives bearing an inheritance that feels less chosen than received. Ban carries the resonance of Transylvanian soil and song, absorbed long before jazz became his working language. Maneri brings an intuitive fluency, shaped by lineage and lived immersion rather than mere instruction. Surman arrives from open landscapes and weathered distances, his voice shaped by wind and horizon, ancient in contour and unsettled in spirit. Together they move as messengers through a forest of inherited material, carrying signals rather than declarations.
That shared path leads to Béla Bartók, whose early 20th-century field recordings in Transylvania revealed a music at once elemental and inexhaustible. Bartók sought preservation through rescue and documentation, gathering what might otherwise vanish. Ban, Maneri, and Surman approach these songs differently. For them, the material functions as a living threshold rather than a dying art, per se. Carols, laments, love songs, and dances do not arrive as artifacts to be handled, but as presences to be encountered, forms capable of friction and renewal.
Rather than fixing these melodies in place, the trio leaves them deliberately open-ended. Transcriptions act as waymarkers rather than maps. Fragments stretch and breathe until new centers of gravity appear. Silences are openings. Roles circulate, dissolve, re-form. What emerges absorbs history without sealing it off, allowing the past to remain porous to the present. Beneath everything runs a current older than borders or schools, a knowledge carried in breath and gesture. Thus, these tunes shelter a human grain, worn smooth by use, whether shaped by peasant hands or bent through jazz.
On Cantica Profana, recorded across three European concerts between November 2022 and November 2023, that grain is fully awakened. The album unfolds like a passage through shadowed terrain, where individual pieces as clearings briefly illuminated. The appearances of “Violin Song I” and “Violin Song II” establish a language of restless intimacy. Their skittering surfaces mask a deep inward focus, as muted piano strings and fragmentary viola lines open space for Surman’s soprano saxophone to move with playful acuity. His voice does not lead so much as observe, circling the material with curiosity. Novelty carries little weight here. These playgrounds are built from old principles and long-held feelings, animated by the freedom with which they are entered.
As the forest deepens, the melodies turn toward absence. “First Return” introduces a somber presence, Surman’s keening soprano a solitary call carried through the night air. That impulse surfaces again in “Last Return,” where wandering itself becomes a form of knowledge. Everything moves in widening circles around silence, the stillness that precedes life and waits beyond it, following not paths marked on maps but traces left by lived experience.
“Dowry Song I,” the first of two such communal clearings along the way, introduces the bass clarinet, its rough fibers weaving textures of interlaced light. Beneath it, Ban’s piano establishes a gentle cadence, enlivening Maneri’s viola until it takes on a copper patina. The trio finds a rocking motion that feels ritualistic, generous, drawing out the melody’s embedded joy before releasing it toward a distant horizon. “Dowry Song II” returns to this space with greater density and color, the voices braided into a resilient weave where each strand strengthens the others.
Other pieces arrive as messages carried from deeper within the trees. “Up There” repeatedly opens with extended bass clarinet meditations, Surman circling the melody until it settles into focus. Around this, Ban and Maneri widen the terrain, giving the line ground and horizon. What follows is often a dance of striking acuity, allowing Maneri room to roam while preserving collective balance. “A Messenger Was Born” distills this sensibility into a quiet prayer and inward dirge for those yet to be lost, for figures glimpsed briefly and never fully named.
“Dark Forest” stands as both setting and invocation. It unfolds as a lush, dreamlike traversal of nocturnal paths, where beauty emerges slowly. Improvisatory spirals coexist with melodic clarity in this, the trio’s deepest attunement. Meanwhile, the title track begins with struck resonance, muted piano notes falling like measured footsteps, before yielding to Maneri’s fluid inflections.
“Evening in the Village” captures darkness as a settling rather than a conclusion. Starlight defines the space as much as shadow. Thoughts, anxieties, romances, and plans continue their quiet circulation. By the time of “Transylvanian Dance,” the accumulated energy breaks open. An anticipatory rhythm gives way to exuberant confluence, Surman’s soprano emerging as a vividly human presence.
The standalone vinyl The Athenaeum Concert, recorded in June 2024 at the Romanian Athenaeum in Bucharest, extends this language with an even deeper patience. Where Cantica Profana often reads like a gathering of poems or stories, this companion album unfolds more like a life remembered in long form. “Evening in the Village (Bitter Love)” opens with a mournful viola that sounds like an extinct instrument briefly summoned back into breath. Wrinkled yet supple, it enters bearing generational weight. As dampened piano footsteps join and the bass clarinet emerges, the music takes on the temperament of weather itself, fog and time moving across the land, before slowly turning toward dance.
The present version of “Dowry Song” leaps immediately into motion, raining promises with the force of embodied love. The bass clarinet grounds itself, inviting participation, while the viola lifts free, buoyed by Ban’s steady, turning pianism. “Up There” again traces a river’s course, winding through brush under historical pressure, moving from insistence to reverie across its span. “Violin Song” builds gradually from quiet stirrings until Surman’s soprano takes flight, migrating toward warmth. Joy radiates through the exchange, though darkness lingers beneath, a reminder that wonder and struggle remain entwined.
Taken together, the two albums read as studies in ethical listening, in how sound is allowed to appear rather than be summoned by force. Their connection lies partly in shared source material, but more decisively in the trio’s instinct to remain inside unfolding time. Duration becomes a form of care. Attention turns toward relationship, toward the ways voices breathe around one another, and toward the responsibility carried by each choice. Folk material is treated as lived terrain, entered with awareness of what has already passed through it and what may yet arrive. From this stance emerges a vision of tradition shaped by patience and watchfulness, where meaning rises slowly from sustained uncertainty.
Maneri is often described as a microtonal improviser, yet the music pursued here feels macrotonal in spirit, resisting borders and divisions in favor of a broader resonance. Ban serves as both anchor and instigator, shaping time without enclosing it, anchoring the ensemble while inviting risk. Surman contributes a voice that feels elemental rather than ornamental, his reeds acting as carriers of weather and message, passing freely through the ensemble like breath through leaves. And so, the distance between Bartók’s Edison phonograph and now collapses into a single resonant gesture, fulfilling his quiet prophecy from 1921, that future musicians might uncover truths the original collectors could not yet hear.
Both albums are available from Sunnyside Records.
The organ is a colossus, the violin a slender voice. By sheer mass and volume, they seem destined never to agree. One threatens to drown the air in thunder, the other to disappear beneath it. And yet, in 17th-century Hamburg, they discovered a shared breath. High in the gallery of St. Catherine’s church, they spoke not as rivals but as companions, drawing crowds who came to hear scale converse with fragility. What could have been a contest was a study in equilibrium, like a skeleton learning, haltingly, how to stand upright.
It was in this bustling hub that Heinrich Scheidemann (c. 1595-1663) and Johann Schop (c. 1590–1667) met across air and string. Their sounds descended like thought itself, Scheidemann’s pipes carrying the gravity of heaven, Schop’s bow and strings tracing the precarious outline of the human voice. What emerged was more than music. It was a convergence of opposites: cleric and townsman, traveler and citizen, the enduring and the fleeting. In that reverberant space, the city heard itself briefly whole, briefly hushed, before motion returned and the pulse of everyday life resumed.
Under Scheidemann’s quick, laughing hands, sound sprang outward, ricocheting through stone and space with wit and momentum. The organ became less a monument than a body with many lungs, capable of sudden whispers as well as exuberant exhalations. Alongside this abundance, Schop’s violin did not retreat. It danced. Its lines flashed with surprise, then slipped without warning into shadow, like muscles tightening and releasing beneath the skin. Between them unfolded a living exchange, in which the church itself became a resonant demonstration that opposites, when truly listening, can cohere into a single organism.
This album invites the listener into a corporeal experience, one that breathes, sweats, remembers, and occasionally stumbles forward in exhilaration. The music of Schop and Scheidemann, as reimagined by 21st-century analogues Martin Davids and David Yearsley, circulates like blood through civic arteries, passing between church lofts, dance floors, and private chambers, rarely holding one posture for long. What binds the recording is neither style nor chronology, but a shared faith in music as something handled, inhabited, and exchanged socially. Sound is treated as anatomy rather than abstraction. What we hear are the bones of it all, flexing, testing their reach, discovering what they can bear.
Schop’s Intrada à 5 from Erster Theil newer Paduanen opens the album by wrapping the senses in gauze. The interwoven voices refuse hierarchy, relying instead on mutual dependence. Each line anticipates the others’ weight and direction, like ribs designed both to protect and expand. This is consort music already aware of its future disassembly and reconfiguration, carrying that latent plasticity within it. The partnership feels so complete that separation seems almost injurious. From the outset, beauty is not the goal but the consequence. Expression rests on marrow and sinew, and imagination requires a listener willing to inhabit the charged space between intention and realization.
Much of the album’s gravitational pull lies within the orbit of ’t Uitnemend Kabinet of 1646, where Schop’s violin resurrects itself as heir and provocateur. His reworking of Alessandro Striggio’s Nasce la pena mia unfolds like a slow-motion game of double dutch, the ropes of austerity and playfulness turning with deliberate care, demanding full coordination to avoid collapse.
The Lachrime Pavaen after John Dowland presses further inward. The soul twists into a Möbius strip of emotional transference, sorrow folding endlessly back upon itself without settling. Chromatic figures reach deep into the gut to retrieve a half-digested grief and hold it up for inspection. Yet nothing here feels morbid; instead, it suggests that emotion without physicality would simply cave in, that even pain needs a skull in which to resonate.
Scheidemann answers this inwardness with motion and propulsion. His Galliarda ex D sets fire beneath the feet, insisting on the intelligence of movement. Rarely do both touch the ground at once. The sound remains perpetually mid-step, angled toward what follows. Dance here is a matter of orientation, a way of thinking forward with the entire frame. That energy carries seamlessly into the Canzon in G, whose relaxed atmosphere allows light and shadow to exchange places with quiet charm, the organ responsive rather than domineering.
At several moments, the album reveals its improvisatory foundations. The performers’ Intonatiofunctions as connective tissue, recalling a time when much of this repertoire lived between the notes, sustained by trust, familiarity, and shared risk. This ethos extends into Scheidemann’s setting of Christ lag in Todesbanden. Told in two verses, the first establishes the firm outline of a torso, while the second pencils in the extremities.
The relationship between instruments grows aerodynamic in Scheidemann’s intabulation of Giovanni Bassani’s Dic nobis Maria. The cadence is measured yet generous, giving the violin space to breathe while the organ subtly lifts and supports. Imagined as wind and wing, the pairing becomes a lesson in controlled flight, with ornamentation serving as lift. This play of disguise reaches its height in the Englische Mascarada, where the organ steps forward alone. It imitates viols, recorders, and cornetts, its movements almost tactile. The backdrop assumes the foreground, and scale itself learns to play, shedding weight without surrendering substance.
Schop’s sine titulo from ’t Uitnemend Kabinet may be the album’s quietest act of defiance. Tone, transition, and spirit nourish one another organically, as if the piece were activating its own nervous system mid-flight. The violin’s occasional double stops flare like shooting stars across an otherwise stable sky, fleeting, unnecessary, and wholly persuasive.
As the program draws toward its close, its communal heart comes fully into view. Schop’s Præludium, the first work ever published for solo violin, clears the air with intent, a measured breath before speaking plainly. What follows, an improvisatory fantasy on his chorale tune Werde munter, mein Gemüte, unfolds as a conversation restored. The organ answers phrase by phrase, until the violin can no longer remain apart and joins the coda. Harmonies shimmer. What emerges is gratitude, rooted in shared labor. The album concludes with the Pavaen de Spanje, whose stark colors and abrupt shifts return us to orbit.
By its end, the recording has quietly redrawn the boundaries of historical performance. This is no reconstruction, but a living metabolism, a system dependent on circulation, exchange, and constant adjustment. The music does not ask to be preserved so much as inhabited. It leaves the listener with the sense of having moved through a body rather than examined an object, of having felt joints flex, lungs fill, and organs hum in sympathetic response. The final sounds do not conclude so much as release, sending us back into the world more aware of our own inner architecture, and perhaps more willing to trust it when it makes overtures to leap.
In the Cabinet of Wonders is available from False Azure Records here.
Every good meal begins with a premise, and this one opens in the kitchen rather than the chapel. The cover caricature sets the tone before a single note is heard: George Frideric Handel rendered as a hog, snout forward, hunched over the organ in mid-18th-century satire. It is a reminder that iconography and appetite have always shared a table. Organist and scholar David Yearsley accepts the joke with a grin and sharpens it into art, giving Handel not only hands but feet with which to prepare. Since Handel himself rarely bothered with pedals in his scores, save for the Organ Concerto in B-flat Major, opus 7, no. 1 (HWV 306), Yearsley’s approach feels less like historical correction than culinary invention, an act of inspired seasoning rather than academic garnish.
This recording is not about dutifully reheating the classics. It is about tasting them anew, discovering how familiar flavors bloom when exposed to different heat, different hands, different feet. Yearsley plays Handel as one might approach a well-loved recipe, respecting the ingredients while daring to improvise at the stove, if not—at the risk of a poor analogy—allowing a rat to pull some hair under the toque.
We start with a clever pairing: Sinfony from Messiah (HWV 56) combined with the Fugue from Suite in E Minor (HWV 429). The unmistakable opening arrives like a dish you have known since childhood, instantly recognizable, deeply comforting. Yet Yearsley plates it with unexpected accompaniments, adding decorations of improvisational whimsy and alert, in-the-moment thinking. The transition into the fugue is seamless and generous, the musical equivalent of warm bread passed across the table. There is solace here, and a sense of being gently welcomed back for seconds.
As with rosy steps, the morn (from Theodora, HWV 68) follows, a radiant oratorio aria that unfolds theatrically on a stage of its own making. Its inner pulse is sensual and full of promise. The music breathes with unanswered questions and lush excitement, each phrase suggesting that the best bite may still be ahead.
At the center of the table sits the Passacaille in G (HWV 399), the giblet bag of the Trio Sonata in G Major. On the organ (no pun intended?), it acquires a lively delicacy, sumptuous yet never heavy. The lines spiral and turn, dancing themselves toward oblivion with an umami that belies their craft. Time seems to loosen its grip here, as though the dish refuses to cool.
Lord, to Thee, each night and day (another Theodora morsel) returns us to the world of aria, moving with grace through fluid key changes that feel both inevitable and surprising. The progression is palpable in its mouthfeel, each modulation a subtle shift in seasoning. When the turn toward the end arrives, it does so quietly, gloriously, a kind of musical retribution that needs no raised voice to make its point.
The communal platter arrives with O praise the Lord with one consent (opening chorus of Chandos Anthem no. 9, HWV 254). Verdant colors and resplendent textures ply the ear, expanding William Croft’s 1708 St. Anne hymn tune into something plush and enveloping. The result is sonic velour, draping the dining surface in lavishness, even if the organist’s feet are working overtime to keep its stitches from fraying.
With Lascia ch’io pianga (from Rinaldo, HWV 7), Handel’s most famous lament from his first London opera of 1711, the organ sings without words. Its vocal qualities survive the transfer intact, barely eroded. Vegetal stops add depth, enhancing the meaty base without overpowering the line. It is a reminder that sorrow, like flavor, often deepens with slow attention.
The heartier courses follow. The Trio Sonata in F, op. 5, no. 6 (HWV 401) sheds its ensemble skin to become a solo affair, compressed into a single instrument yet expanded by the breadth of Yearsley’s imagination. The central Allegro dazzles with its tessellated structure, each piece fitting snugly against the next, while the subsequent Adagio melts everything down into a rich, savory gravy that coats every note. Close behind comes the Concerto in G minor/G major, op. 4, no. 1 (HWV 289), another full-course meal in a full-course meal of full-course meals. Highlights abound, from the delightful second-movement Allegro to the concluding Andante, a light-footed wonder that dances around the table, refusing to sit still.
For dessert, Yearsley offers his adaptation of the “Amen” from Messiah, recast as a Fuga in D. It culminates in a pedal cadenza that is itself a four-part fugue played only with the feet. The effect is brilliantly virtuosic and deeply satisfying, as organic as farmers market ingredients transformed by a confident cook who trusts the produce and his palate.
A bonus track serves as the final flourish: A Hallelujah Concerto, an improvisation on Handel’s most beloved chorus. Composer and performer seem to spur one another on, whipping the soufflé together until the peaks stand just right. It is exuberant, inventive, and impossible to resist. A finish to end all finishes, at least until the next course.
When the last resonance fades, the table is cleared, and the listener is left pleasantly full. Satisfaction lingers, along with the faint sense that something mischievous and marvelous has just occurred. You may want to keep your napkin as a souvenir. It bears the marks of a meal well enjoyed and proof that Handel, in the right hands and feet, still knows how to cook.
The album is the third release from False Azure Records, an exciting new label where old and new make merry. My ear continues to follow them with keen interest.
“You that in far-off countries of the sky can dwell secure,
look back upon me here; for I am weary of this frail world’s decay.”
– Murasaki Shikibu, The Tale of Genji
What does it mean to commemorate a tragedy? Is remembrance an ethical imperative, a refusal to let past violence dissolve into abstraction, or an act of humility that acknowledges life as provisional, evaporating even as we reach for it and leaving only residue as memorial? These questions are not philosophical curiosities but preconditions, pressing upon us as inhabitants of a world in which catastrophe is no longer exceptional but recurrent. Whether we are welcomed into the social fabric or violently excised from it, erased until no thread remains to testify to our presence, we are left with unfinished desires and unlived lives. The future becomes an amputated limb, felt as absence, aching nonetheless.
Confronted with atrocity, the psyche’s first response is erasure. Memory folds inward, constructing architectures of absence meant to spare us endless replay. On an individual level, this forgetting can be merciful; on a collective scale, it is untenable. Trauma migrates and returns through architecture, sirens, televised repetition, and the language of fear that reshapes daily life. This is what renders trauma unspeakable: not silent, but overdetermined, burdened by language that buckles under its weight. To remember and retell is therefore not only historical fidelity but an attempt at psychic repair, a reaching toward coherence that acknowledges rupture as fundamental.
Trauma unfolds within a tension between denial and compulsion, between dissociation’s numbing fog and the violent clarity of reliving. Dissociation functions as a protective splitting, allowing the mind to survive what it cannot integrate. This explains why trauma narratives are fragmented, contradictory, and radically subjective and why they are so often pathologized, reduced to symptoms rather than recognized as meaning-making labor. Not only victims but witnesses are caught in this oscillation, raising the deeper question of how recurrence might be transformed into care, how involuntary return could become an act of tending rather than re-injury.
William Basinski never set out to address these concerns. Yet The Disintegration Loops does so with an intimacy and rigor that feels almost inevitable in retrospect.
In July of 2001, Basinski was transferring analog tape loops recorded in 1982 into digital format, hoping to preserve them. Instead, he discovered that the magnetic coating was deteriorating, each playback stripping away more and more material. The music began to die as it was being saved. Rather than intervene, Basinski listened, recording the collapse in real time. Two months later, on September 11, he played the first completed piece while watching the towers fall from his Brooklyn apartment. What began as an accident revealed itself to be an elegy, not by intention but by alignment.
This strictly limited box set, released by Temporary Residence Ltd in 2012, gathers the complete Disintegration Loops across four CDs, accompanied by a fifth disc of live orchestrations and a DVD documenting the smoke-filled aftermath as seen from Basinski’s window. Together, they form a durational encounter with loss understood as a process rather than an event.
The opening movement, Dlp 1.1, unfolds like a funereal hymn performed by a military band trapped within its own cycle of grief. Each iteration inches toward healing without ever arriving. Time behaves asymptotically, with consolation endlessly approached and never attained. The elegiac quality feels not ornamental but necessary, as though these sounds constitute the only response left to a collective brought to its knees. The loop does not simply repeat itself but erodes, its subtle alterations inviting the listener to shift attention and settle into new details even as the core remains recognizable. This mirrors aging itself. The self persists while the body thins, surfaces fray, and entropy asserts its claim. What gives the experience its gravity is its insistence that we remain alert to impermanence. Nothing here pretends to endure. At a certain point, a shadow passes through the sound, and meaning seems to gather beneath the rubble. In moments of shock, reality becomes elastic. Time slows, distance collapses, and language recoils. This music does not translate that condition. It inhabits it.
As the work moves into Dlp 2.1, an uneasy American pastoralism emerges. Layers hover and pulse, carrying a sensation felt more than heard, as if coursing beneath the skin. Reverie is encouraged, along with visions of a time when technology seemed less predatory, though perhaps it never truly was. The music floats without detaching, tethered to gravity even in its most gently transcendent moments. When the reverie fades, what remains is the recognition that transience is not an interruption of life but its substance. Kingdoms rise upon fantasies of permanence, and this loop dissolves them quietly, without spectacle. That dissolution deepens with Dlp 2.2, which scrapes against the wheel of time itself, one made of stone and lubricated by centuries of blood and tears. Ancestral bones grind into powder, feeding a morose mill powered by a river that is both divine and suffocating. Breath turns liquid. Motion continues without destination. Meaning churns rather than resolves. Handmade accents surface, distant horns and fragile drums, as if created for the purpose of breaking (and they do break). Smoke thickens. The air becomes uninhabitable for language. Without charity, we fragment into isolated links in a chain that once encircled the world and now corrodes in our hands. This is not a movement toward closure but an opening, a door already flung wide, revealing that love draws its intensity from fear and that vulnerability is the condition of connection.
With Dlp 3, the work enters the dark sublime at its deepest register. Creation becomes audible, revolving endlessly around itself. Childhood memories surface without invitation. Alternate selves walk beside us. The ground feels unstable, and to listen is to hang suspended by a thread woven from the detritus of one’s own body, shed hairs, discarded cells, forgotten versions of the self. A recursive recognition takes hold. I see myself watching myself. I know I have been here before. I turn away and glimpse you, mistaking myself for someone else, steadied only by the belief that the stars remain, waiting to guide us home. But what happens when home has been irrevocably altered, when the skyline smiles back with missing teeth, when the dream reveals itself as soot in the lungs and bodies rendered particulate? Hope does not vanish here. It circles, drawn by gravity, holding coherence together through sheer persistence. If you die before I do, I will live for both of us.
Dlp 4 sweeps the listener away. Flesh yields to sensation, and the mind consecrates surrender. Orientation dissolves as winds rake the plains, teasing demons from the soil. Dust ascends. Fear reveals how easily it can masquerade as intimacy when crisis arrives. Beauty persists, compressed into a single breath before being stolen away. Nothing can be restored, yet everything can be remembered. The music dies audibly. With Dlp 5, light breaks through with quiet authority, not blinding but decisive. Yesterday returns. Sun on skin. Promise in the air. The towers stand again, angelic in their familiarity, until realization arrives. This was always temporary.
Dlp 6 allows hope to return, tempered by grief. Understanding arrives too late to prevent harm, yet early enough to matter. Scars become inevitable. Memory and forgetting oscillate, exhausting but generative, and through this movement, defenses form not against the world, but against paralysis. The returns of Dlp 1.2 and Dlp 1.3 function less as reprises than as reckonings. One unfolds as an epilogue of the soul, where love remains possible though never redemptive, where no ecstasy compensates for loss and no reconciliation guarantees comprehension. The final return is granular and worn, a restoration undertaken with full knowledge of the cost and the conviction that the attempt itself was necessary.
Trauma does not reside solely in the event but in our tendency to become trapped within our responses to it. Healing requires transformation. This music functions as an unspoken reminder that something remains hidden yet shared, an existential tremor binding us together. The Disintegration Loops offers a reorientation, teaching us how to remain with what cannot be repaired. It refuses the fantasy of transcendence that would lift us cleanly out of history, asking instead that we stay within duration, accepting that meaning accumulates through attention rather than arriving through revelation.
What emerges from this sustained listening is a form of solidarity that does not announce itself. It does not rally or instruct. It gathers. Each listener becomes a vessel for the same slow erosion and fragile persistence. In this way, the work performs a quiet ethics, reminding us that survival is not an individual achievement but a shared condition, and that grief is most bearable when held in common, even across vast distances of time and experience. The loops bind us not by synchrony but by vulnerability, by the recognition that what breaks in one place reverberates elsewhere.
There is generosity in allowing decay to speak. By refusing to interrupt the tapes’ dissolution, Basinski grants the material world a kind of dignity, permitting it to complete its own sentence. This gesture extends toward us as well. We are permitted to falter, to lose coherence, to shed pieces of ourselves without forfeiting our worth. If there is hope here, it is not of renewal or return but of continuity without illusion, of carrying forward what remains even when it is fragile and incomplete. The loops end, but listening persists, in memory, in shared silence, in the altered way we attend to the world after the sound has faded. Something survives because it is carried.
Central Park’s mosaics of reservoir, lake, paths and gardens names the first duo recording between trumpeter Wadada Leo Smith and pianist-organist Amina Claudine Myers. It’s also an apt metaphor for this fated coming together. The park is a place where distinct elements coexist without competing, where horizons keep shifting depending on where you stand and how long you linger. The same is true here. Myers, newly crowned with the more-than-deserved title of NEA Jazz Master in 2024, reaches deep into the caverns of her lived experience, drawing up raw ore from eras that still shine in her memory. Smith—himself a master, visionary, and fellow first-wave AACM member—opens doors worn smooth by time yet still swinging freely on their hinges. Together, they make a room feel larger simply by entering it. To hear them share air is like waking gently from uninterrupted sleep just as the sun begins to slip between trees and buildings, a thin blade of gold dividing dream from day.
“Conservatory Gardens” emerges from that threshold with Myers at the piano, her touch shaping the terrain before the listener with an almost mystical receptivity. Her phrases crest and dip like small hills, and Smith answers with the kind of breath that seems to turn the unseen visible. The heart of the duo beats openly here, exhaling what cannot be kept, inhaling what must be carried. With each exchange, they shed the weight of old confidences and doubts alike, making room for fresh memory to sprout. The piece ends in a sparkle of high piano keys, like a handful of coins flung into a fountain.
That glimmer carries into “Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis Reservoir,” though the energy shifts. This is a brief but vivid ride through sunlit water, a handful of moments suspended between rhythm and reflection. Myers moves to the Hammond B3, and the air between the musicians grows charged, shimmering like heat on a city sidewalk in August. Or is it winter’s sheen, the delicate silver of a frozen surface holding its breath? Such is the multivalence of their language: one gesture, two meanings, both true.
From the promise of morning and the fullness of midday waters, we arrive at “Central Park at Sunset.” Here, the light tilts toward indigo, and the city that never sleeps permits itself a rare moment of stillness. Smith and Myers play with a darker warmth, as if acknowledging that even ceaseless motion casts a shadow where rest might hide. Their pacing slows; the atmosphere grows languid, tinged with something nearly mournful—not despairing, but honest, a reminder that endings are just beginnings caught between breaths.
“The Harlem Meer” widens the frame again, offering a wingspan that spans both the intimate and the immense. The music floats with quiet purpose, occupying only as much space as it needs, leaving room for listeners, memories, and spirits to fly alongside it. There is grace in that restraint, a generosity that doesn’t announce itself but is felt nevertheless.
The album’s twin tributes, “Albert Ayler, a meditation in light” and “Imagine, a mosaic for John Lennon,” honor two artists whose visions cracked open the world in different but equally luminous ways. Ayler’s piece manifests in chiaroscuro, where the borders between radiance and shadow blur and reform themselves. The nod to Lennon, by contrast, dwells in both movement and stillness, its shifting textures forming a picture that seems to rearrange itself with each listen. Together, these tracks offer a kind of yin and yang, a dialogue of forces that meet in the liminal zone where sky meets land. One could fall asleep there, nestled between contrast and complement.
In his liner notes, John Corbett calls the album “a central spot, a convention center for the reconvening of heavy spirits and sympathetic souls.” This becomes especially evident in “When Was,” the only composition not by Smith but by Myers herself. It is a piano solo placed at the album’s center. The piece begins tentatively, stepping as if uncertain whether the ground will hold. Then, slowly but unmistakably, Myers finds her footing. Her voice strengthens. A door opens. And suddenly the sky is within reach. She swallows it whole—not greedily, but reverently—allowing its storms and clouds to move through her, granting them flesh, letting them speak.
In her playing, metaphors become visceral: a tourniquet slipping from a newly vaccinated arm; a child’s secret wish cupped tenderly by her single mother; a wanderer tasting hope in a single moment of unconditional kindness. The city exhales its ghosts one by one, making space for new life to take root. As Myers builds toward abstraction, the mood bends toward hope. She restores the scenery not by repainting it but by gazing at it as if for the first time. And when the final notes crest and dissolve, they leave behind the unmistakable trace of joy promised and joy delivered.
An important aesthetic principle in ikebana, the Japanese art of flower arranging, is known as ma: the interval, the pause that holds all gestures in balance. This recording lives within that interval. Each sound is a petal in still air, its meaning found not in arrival but in suspension.
The album’s story begins at Banlieues Bleues in Paris, 2018. There, pianist Marilyn Crispell, Hardanger fiddle player Benedicte Maurseth, and reedist David Rothenberg gathered to explore the early birdsong transcriptions of Olivier Messiaen. In these notations, the wildness of the natural world first touched paper before it was tamed by harmony. A year later, Iva Bittová was added to the mix, her voice bridging word and weather.
Together, the quartet steps into the fragile terrain between music and its memory. What emerges, through years of subsequent reflection and patient shaping, feels less composed than revealed: a series of conversations with the unseen.
The first notes are a line drawn thin. Piano and clarinet trace its contour, a horizon trembling at the edge of being. From within that tremor, a voice unfurls, and the world begins its slow Folding. The fiddle answers from another time, its tone flecked with age and dust. The players seem to move by intuition, mapping silence the way birds adapt to wind: by feel, not by sight. What takes shape is not melody but the suggestion of one, a phrase on the verge of being spoken.
From the residue of that stillness, Ashlight begins to appear, pale and flickering, illumination born of what has burned away. Maurseth’s bow draws the dawn into being while Crispell drops her chords into water. Each tone contains its own echo. It neither advances nor repeats but hovers, luminous and uncertain, as if listening for its own reflection. Gradually, the instruments find each other in motion. Piano, fiddle, and bass clarinet circle in slow orbit, their lines folding inward and out again like geological strata. Hence Syncline, the meeting of two curves beneath the surface. Their rhythm is not one of time but of breath, a tide sensed more than counted. When Bittová enters, she brings something remembered rather than sung, a folk melody that the earth itself might hum when no one is listening.
In the wake of that convergence comes a retreat into intimacy. Fingers pluck at strings, keys whisper, tones barely formed—what the group calls Know No No, a study in almost-saying. Here, we behold a spiderweb of gestures catching the small debris of thought. A faint rustle passes through: the shimmer of Ruffle, where light and water trade reflections. The bow glides near silence, and the piano answers in small ripples, as if repeating the same idea in a different language. One senses communication without intention, like wind tracing reeds. And then, a sudden brightness opens the room, the solemn turning toward play.
The music leans into Anticline, the upward curve that follows a descent. Rothenberg’s clarinet teases, while Bittová answers in bursts of speech remembered from a dream. The ascetic finds her smile; the ritual learns to dance. It is here that the human reenters the sacred through joy. The air thickens again as if preparing for transformation. Out of the mix rise real-world signatures in Magpie, Moth. Rothenberg weaves them into the ensemble as if greeting long-lost kin. His bass clarinet decodes the nocturnal death’s head hawk moth, his seljefløyte joins the Australian magpie’s bright cry in an ecology of listening. The others respond in turn: piano breathing like wind through branches, Bittová’s voice flickering between the human and the elemental. For a moment, it is impossible to tell what is performed and what simply exists.
Out of this communion comes darkness. Crispell’s piano turns inward, each chord heavy and deliberate, the sound of thought imploding in sequence. Maurseth’s fiddle flashes briefly, a line of copper in shadow, and the piece known as Crinkle unfolds as an elegy for what has been touched and passed through. Here, absence finds its form, but the descent softens. From the quiet grows a song that seems to belong to no one, a Soft Fall through the air. Bittová sings as though speaking to the trees; the others move with her, their tones fragile as breath. There is no drama, only continuity, the sense that nature has momentarily found its human voice. The later pieces exist on the border of dissolution.
In Opposite of Time, the instruments scrape, sigh, and wander, seeking an equilibrium beyond rhythm, beyond structure. Here, the quartet listens not to one another but through one another. What follows is both release and return. The clarinet exhales, the piano sends a faint shimmer into the distance, and the fiddle carries us outward into Unfolding, a final gesture that feels less like an ending than an opening. A tune dissolves into the horizon, its players into the air.
When the last vibration fades, it becomes clear that this project was never about birds, nor about interpretation, but about presence: the act of being still enough to hear the world think. It is a study in attention, how breath becomes tone, how tone becomes silence, how silence, when held long enough, begins to sing.
Four Fold is currently available digitally on Bandcamp and will be on all streaming sites as of November 21, 2025.
ONE is the debut of EUROPE IN FLAMES, the apocalyptic ambient project of Jason Wach and Hamish Low. In this intentional sonic sanctuary, the duo has crafted a refuge from the din of the current zeitgeist. In this space, the thunder of sociopolitical conflict becomes a distant shudder, melodic signals from afar. This is not an apocalypse of fire and smoke but the quieter aftermath that follows. It is the long exhalation after the collapse, the stillness that asks what it means to create once everything familiar has burned away.
The album opens with “for those who know the dawn,” a piece that serves as an invocation. Piano tones scatter their seeds on barren soil, mingling with the soft hiss of static and what might be the faint hum of machinery left running in an abandoned building. Each note gestures toward rebirth but is shadowed by the awareness that loss is first required. The track inhabits that moment when the first bird calls, not to announce light but to mourn the dark. This forlorn sentiment is only magnified in “forgetting how to breathe.” As low frequencies bloom in bruises, the listener feels themselves dissolving into vapor, suspended between panic and surrender. Dreams twist into strange geometries; trauma scratches the surface of consciousness like windblown branches on a windowpane. This is where the moral infrastructure of the self begins to crumble, leaving behind the rawness of skinned emotions.
The title of “seal the images in an envelope and say nothing” serves as a commandment as repression takes the place of grace. The atmosphere thickens until movement slows to molasses. Within this stagnation, a distant, rasping tone threads through the mix, binding us to our own restraint. The song becomes an act of preservation, suggesting that silence, too, can be a form of resistance. We then find ourselves “stumbling home through the rain.” After so much enclosure, it is a benediction. Its percussion on metal and stone creates a rhythm more human than a heartbeat. Digital glitches flicker through the soundscape, prayers half-remembered. The world, fractured as it is, feels newly sacred. A woman’s distorted voice emerges, a ghost in the circuitry. She becomes our lone witness, her syllables igniting the sky with fluorescent melancholy before “nocturne” lubricates the central axis with its ode to fragmentation. The piano and electronics drift apart, unable to find resolution, yet their disunity feels deliberate and compassionate. The music forgives itself for breaking, inviting us to do the same.
The closing track, “upon waking,” is a new beginning. Dawn finally breaks, revealing not salvation but continuity. The world is still in ruins, yet the rubble hums with faint electrical life. Smoke lingers, dust swirls, and through it all runs a current of hope: the fragile belief that creation can begin again, quietly, invisibly, from within. Every contact of the flesh, every fleeting gesture, sends out an unreturnable signal into the void that says, We are still here.
The album’s surreal brilliance lies in how it blurs the distinction between sound and memory, between the present and its ghosts. When archival voices or cinematic fragments surface, as in a clip from 12 Angry Men, they don’t feel sampled so much as resurrected. They reach us as if from another planet, their gravity warped, their meaning refracted. And yet, because of this distance, they cut deeper. Like nightowls who swear by the strange clarity that arrives when the sun has vanished and the world sleeps, they are most alive in that hour when thought loosens its grip. But ONE is not of the night. It lives in that trembling, liminal moment just before dawn, when the first blue light begins to touch the earth. This is music for that boundary state between remembering and forgetting.
ONE is currently available from bandcamp here.
Mediavolo is a band like no other. Based in Brest, France, they offer insight into the human condition with honest and patient attention. Back in 2014, I interviewed core members Géraldine Le Cocq and Jacques Henry, adding my own throughts on their discography as it then stood. Away Within is their first full-length release since that time, and I was recently honored to write the liner notes for it. The album is available on Bandcamp here. Once you dive in, you’ll never go back…
Between Sound and Space: ECM Records and Beyond 