Non-ECM Reviews

Alan Pasqua: My New Old Friend

| Tyran Grillo

Time has a peculiar way of inhabiting music, gathering in the hollows between notes and returning through melodies whose origins have long since dissolved into memory. For pianist Alan Pasqua, whose career has traversed the incandescent frontiers of jazz fusion and the intimate architectures of acoustic improvisation, such temporal hauntings find exquisite expression in My New Old Friend. Having studied with Jaki Byard and joined Tony Williams’ New Lifetime following a fateful Carnegie Hall encounter in 1975, Pasqua later lent his harmonic imagination to Bob Dylan and Santana. His celebrated “Proto-Cosmos” remains an emblem of that earlier volcanic vocabulary. Yet beneath the electricity, another language had been quietly ripening, one whose silences carry the sediment of entire lifetimes. Released by Cryptogramophone in 2005, My New Old Friend gathers six originals and five lovingly reconsidered standards into a meditation on remembrance’s peculiar elasticity.

The title acquires particular poignancy through the intertwined histories of its musicians. Pasqua and drummer Peter Erskine first crossed paths at Indiana University, sharing a Bloomington farmhouse in 1971 before their careers carried them across the expanding cartographies of jazz. Bassist Darek Oles, a more recent collaborator, completes this convergence of histories. Recorded at Conway Studios in Hollywood during sessions spanning 2003 and 2004, the album was conceived with almost devotional attention to detail. Pasqua even brought his handcrafted Yamaha S6 into the studio to ensure a particular sound. Oles supplies a supple gravitational center while Erskine’s exquisitely calibrated touch allows rhythm to breathe beyond its own circumference. Companionship becomes a form of listening whose deepest syntax is the freedom to discover something previously unimagined in someone already known.

“You Must Believe in Spring” opens with a lushly articulated piano introduction, an act of emotional architecture whose foundations materialize beneath our feet as we enter. Pasqua’s touch is sensitive yet texturally bold, every harmonic choice carrying a quiet inevitability. Erskine skips with the grace of a waterskater while Oles swings through the gaps in the trees on a vine of utterly melodic fortitude. “All the Things You Are” brings a more spirited gait, Erskine’s cymbals scintillating at the edges of Pasqua’s effortless invention. The trio plays as though it had written the tune, its changes passing through their hands as naturally as breath. “Body and Soul,” meanwhile, locates nostalgia at the microscopic level. You cannot see it with the naked eye, yet you feel it unmistakably in the clothed heart. Pasqua’s solo dips a tentative toe into a river down which the trio’s vessel has been gliding all along. Such hesitation, held within an otherwise unbroken trust, becomes its own measure of beauty. Jimmy Webb’s “Wichita Lineman” spreads its soft, creamy abundance into every nook and cranny of the imagination until it ceases to be visible. Even “Smile,” the balladic offramp, offers something considerably grander than a fond farewell, its tenderness ambulating with an unsettling lucidity.

Pasqua’s originals sit comfortably alongside these tried-and-true companions. From the opening gestures of “Barcelona,” we are in masterful hands, guided through fluid changes of light and scenery. Its urban touch is wonderfully unobtrusive, and Oles’s bubbling solo wells up from someplace deeper than the street beneath it. “Vienna” opens with another masterful introduction, verdant with the tenderness of an embrace postponed for years. As it slides into a mid-tempo anthem, the city of the title seems to surrender its physical coordinates and become an address within.

“Highway 14” extends into motion, with Lina Brunkell’s wordless vocals lending the open road a reflective sheen that doubles the sky along with the possibilities of arrival. Pasqua floats with the ease of a leaf surrendered to its own trajectory. Underneath, Oles shoulders much of the melodic weight while Erskine quietly clears the path, each rhythmic gesture offering reassurance without dictating a destination. The road becomes an unwritten sentence belonging equally to departure and anticipation. Through Brunkell’s voice, language itself momentarily forgets its vocation to explain and evokes the peculiar eloquence of having nothing to prove.

The title track is a timeless ballad seemingly created in the moment of its telling. Pasqua’s organic soloing traces the fine line between what has been remembered and what is being invented, until the two become inseparable. “One More Once” occupies a more askew rhythmic terrain, every slide and sudden turn handled with such mastery that even its darker shades feel necessary. Pasqua’s gorgeous runs find every necessary current in the rhythm section. “Stick Slap,” meanwhile, is a romping good time that speaks in smiles, displaying the trio’s coherence at its most exuberant. Even here, virtuosity never becomes a contest for the foreground.

I am admittedly late to the party in placing this recording on my virtual turntable, but perhaps lateness is precisely the point. Those who come to Between Sound and Space for more than ECM should by all means seek this one out. Few recordings make generosity sound quite so rigorously intelligent. What stays with me most is the quiet ethical possibility concealed in the album’s title. To call someone an old friend is to acknowledge a history; to call that same person new is to admit that history can never exhaust a human being. Knowledge of another person can become a beautiful form of captivity. Pasqua and his companions open the door of that captivity from within, allowing recognition to remain open to surprise. Perhaps this is the most difficult kind of fidelity: granting those we love the right to exceed the person we have made of them. The music poses a question whose consequences reach into every human encounter. What if we listened to strangers with the patience we reserve for old friends, and to old friends with the astonishment owed to strangers?

Rafael Anton Irisarri: Points of Inaccessibility

| Tyran Grillo

The distance between two points is ordinarily a problem for geometry. On Points of Inaccessibility, it becomes a pathology of attention. A chance encounter at MUTEK in Mexico City in 2024 brought Ibero-American composer Rafael Anton Irisarri into conversation with Dutch media artist Jaco Schilp, whose invitation to the Uncloud residency in Utrecht the following spring led their inquiry into the abandoned carcass of the Pieter Baan Centre. Once a forensic psychiatric prison, the building had specialized in extracting intelligibility from captivity; now its emptied rooms hosted a different form of interrogation. Irisarri stretched bowed-guitar notes through looping circuitry until each gesture acquired the dimensions of a corridor without an exit, while Schilp’s custom point-cloud software translated the live sound into visual constellations perpetually failing to hold their shape. Here, the apparatus designed to render experience legible produced its own exquisite illegibility, a digital Rorschach in which perception caught itself manufacturing evidence. The building’s carceral history seeped into the circuitry, lending each disintegrating image the afterlife of something forcibly remembered.

Returning to New York, Irisarri approached those improvisations as ruins still inhabited by their makers. He mapped fragments into MIDI, insinuated Prophet 5 harmonies and Moog undertows beneath the bowed strings, then enlisted Abul Mogard’s editorial ear to preserve the encounter’s original volatility. The album’s title borrows from remote coordinates whose identities are determined by distance, but turns the cartographic conceit against our supposed culture of perpetual contact. Every algorithm promises a shortcut to intimacy while manufacturing fresh interiors of estrangement; every simulated acknowledgment arrives carrying the faint bureaucratic odor of an absence already processed and filed. Irisarri calls these compensatory rites “digital shamanism,” although their sorcery belongs to capitalist realism, which has taught alienation to impersonate its own cure. Across four movements, Points of Inaccessibility listens for the human pulse inside that recursive deception, excavating a hauntology of suspended futures from the detritus of technological communion. Memory persists as interference in a system increasingly incapable of remembering what its connections were meant to connect. Presence becomes the vanishing point of its own transmission, leaving consciousness to wander the immaculate circumference of an intimacy whose center has been quietly outsourced.

“Faded Ghosts of Clouds” is the voice of an unborn generation emanating from a realm that, despite being right beneath our feet, is all too easily ignored in the hustle and bustle of our everyday lives. The painful irony is that, while technology blinds us to the details of existence that make it so beautiful, it remains the apparatus by which such music becomes possible, gathering otherwise estranged elements into an orbit so internal that we have forgotten how to make physical contact with it. Drones of electronics and string-borne songs creep toward the edges of our collective waking dream. Across their slow ebb and flow, we are implicated as mere driftwood in the cosmic tide, reaching our arms out in slow motion toward the shore but coming up with only sand slipping through our trembling fingers. And while the textures mount and the notes appear to go skyward, our bodies sink in proportion, never knowing what light might await above the surface. There is something embryological about this inversion of gravity, as though the music were gestating an entire civilization within the amniotic darkness of its own forgotten origins. Each swelling frequency brings us closer to an inheritance we cannot claim without first acknowledging how much of ourselves we have surrendered to the machinery of recognition.

“Breaking the Unison” emerges as a child thereof, possessed of its own rebellious streak and a grittier electric guitar sound that magnifies its voice beyond fleshly containment. The more it cries out to be heard, the less defined it becomes, drowning in a sea of its own making as the world swarms inward over and over, until the face ceases to function as an individual marker and identity becomes one final exhale of illusory fixity. Yet there is a strange tenderness in this erosion, a willingness to inhabit the wound of differentiation before language cauterizes it with a name. Irisarri allows distortion to assume the dimensions of an unfinished autobiography, its pages written in the granular debris of sensations that never achieved the dignity of recollection. What remains is a kind of prenatal dissent, the terrible freedom of a consciousness discovering that the boundaries protecting its singularity might also be responsible for its loneliness.

With parent and child brought under the same galactic umbrella, their home is constituted by “Signals from a Distant Afterglow.” The title is prophetic, speaking in a language of arcs and pulses that, ordinarily too minute to be held and regarded, suddenly become knowable in human terms. The music extends its feelers into the interstices of perception, where every vibration seems to contain a small archaeology of the future. Then something miraculous happens, as vocal loops provided by Karen Vogt permit the possibility that something familiar may yet be found in the great unknown. Although wordless, her presence speaks volumes about the soul and its tender cage, suggesting that even the most intimate utterance must pass through a labyrinth of estrangement before reaching another consciousness. Her voice acquires the fragility of an artifact excavated from a future extinction, bearing the fingerprints of someone whose existence has yet to occur. The resulting intimacy is almost unbearable because its object remains suspended just beyond our capacity to identify it. We recognize the yearning before we can remember whom we have been yearning for.

The bars of that tender cage are comprised of “Memory Strands,” whose enveloping textures seem to originate in a place that has already held us in its hands from conception. As tender as it is clear in its delineation of heart from mind, the piece provides just enough order to arrest our fear of falling over the cliff of uncertainty. A portal within a portal, it opens a pathway into itself, ad infinitum, serenading us through its recursive slipstream. There are echoes here of Stephen Scott’s bowed piano works enmeshed with William Basinski’s loops and filtered through Tim Hecker’s incandescent abrasions, although such coordinates offer only provisional access to an interior that continually redraws its own perimeter. So much depth resides in these pieces, so many corners in which we might cower in awe at the immensity of this reality in which we find ourselves. Their beauty emerges from the possibility that memory, in preserving our intimacy with what has vanished, also perpetuates the original violence of its disappearance.

Perhaps this is where Points of Inaccessibility makes its most unsettling proposition. The Pieter Baan Centre was once dedicated to determining the contents of human interiority, converting the bewildering opacity of another person into something admissible as knowledge. Its former inhabitants were subjected to an institutional faith in the legibility of the soul. Irisarri returns us to that predicament through the spectral machinery of a world increasingly devoted to making every consciousness available for inspection. Yet the music carries within its fractures a quietly radical possibility: that our deepest obligation to one another might involve protecting what cannot be accessed. What if the ultimate intimacy were the recognition of another’s right to remain unknowable, even to those who love them? The geography of isolation would then disclose an unsuspected ethics of hospitality, one in which distance becomes a form of tenderness and the uncharted core acquires the sanctity of a home. At the remotest coordinate of this extraordinary album, we discover that the first act of love is to leave something in another person forever undiscovered, so that even the universe, with all its instruments of detection, must learn the humility of approaching a closed door without turning the handle.

Mediavolo: Live at the Novomax

| Tyran Grillo

Filmed on October 26, 2024, at the Novomax in Quimper, France, Mediavolo’s intimate return to the stage brings songs separated by years into bodily proximity. Guitarist and band composer Jacques Henry, keyboardist Fabrice Duhamel, drummer Lionel Prigent, and bassist David Carquet give compositions that invite solitary absorption in the studio the immediacy of people listening to one another as they play. Older material absorbs the experience gathered since its creation, while songs from Away Within find unexpected ancestors among earlier recordings. Throughout, Géraldine Le Cocq’s voice inhabits the delicate interval between a character’s predicament and her own emotional knowledge, drawing nourishment from both.

The concert begins where 2011’s Modern Cause begins, with “Dan,” though its position here gives the song a second threshold to cross. Its family estrangement grows from recognizable intimacies into an imagined future in which affection has become inaccessible to those who assumed it would endure. Small differences accumulate the mineral weight of an accusation; a familiar gesture returns bearing the seal of a foreign government. Gé enters that emotional jurisdiction with striking immediacy. Personal experience supplies the protagonist with a history that feels lived without demanding literal autobiography. Jac’s guitar and Prigent’s drums press against the vocal line, giving the estrangement a physical resistance.

That question acquires a technological complication in “Disembodied Vision” (Away Within, 2024). The severances running through its parent album turn toward the prospect of delegating human uncertainty to an intelligence promised as a cure for human limitation. What becomes of suffering when its supposed healer has no wound through which to recognize it? Duhamel lends the problem an insinuating beauty, his keyboard harmonies so persuasive that surrender briefly seems reasonable. The indictment travels through the seductiveness of its surface, beneath which unease gathers around the fantasy of infallibility. We have emptied so much of ourselves into our inventions that their answers can carry the authority of stolen organs. Yet Duhamel’s playing remains tethered to his bandmates’ responsiveness. The next chord still depends on a human decision, made within earshot of another person’s breath.

“Up Ahead” (Modern Cause, 2011) reopens the relationship between anticipation and remembrance. Its beauty has a peculiar temporal ache, moving forward while the chorus turns toward a life that cannot accompany it. Cocteau Twins affinities shimmer through the guitar, yet the emotional center belongs to Gé. She gives room for longing to develop its own logic, each phrase negotiating the distance between what can be imagined and what can be reached. Memory acquires a future tense, an impossible grammar the music makes briefly usable. A retreat into the band’s beginnings follows with “Wh/Amphibious Oblivion” (Soleil Sans Retour, 2003). Prigent’s skittering drums disturb Jac’s ostinato without dislodging its pull, and the harmonies spread a submerged luminosity. Carquet adds a gentle insistence beneath this aquatic reverie, touching the body before interpretation can intervene. Gé’s voice enlarges the water imagery into a condition of being that loosens its terrestrial obligations and articulates an existence without the hard punctuation of a shore.

Such permeability becomes harder to sustain in “Unbidden Truth” (Away Within, 2024), which reveals the cost of mistaking our field of vision for the dimensions of existence. Unexpected key changes alter the chorus’s proportions from within. A wall believed to be structural suddenly admits a passage, and the heart must revise its floor plan. The music’s insistent brightness brings responsibility, if only because seeing farther means acknowledging how much we have organized around a restricted view. Freedom requires the uncomfortable labor of revising oneself. “Rage” (Away Within, 2024) then enters a more obstructed interior. Duhamel’s spiderwebbed keyboards catch language before it becomes intelligible; the struggle to understand turns inward, loosening the masonry of certainty. Gé’s additional guitar increases the pressure until the arrangement seems to contain more force than its architecture can house.

My history with the band began with “Misunderstanding” (A Secret Sound, 2006), which I encountered through a Cocteau Twins station on Pandora while attending to some forgettable task. Whenever it returned, I stopped working. Each interruption asked for an attention my routine could not accommodate. Eventually, the task became incidental and the song part of my life. Hearing it live revisits that encounter with the knowledge of everything it opened. There is a pleasing complication in remembering that an automated recommendation delivered me to music whose human particularity has remained indispensable. The listener I was has somewhere to meet the listener I have become, and neither can pronounce the other finished.

The exacting construction of “Dr Quayle” (Unaltered Empire, 2008) brings another human experiment into view. Its compositional precision heightens the writing’s laboratory atmosphere, where intention blurs into the desire to control its consequences. Jac’s solo cuts across that precision with exposed anguish, and Gé’s powerful upper register carries the final stretch toward a startling vulnerability. Gothic and darkwave associations gather around these textures, though the performance gives such categories little time to settle. Wide musical appetites have always made Mediavolo open to grand stylistic possibilities, and the band’s precision keeps that breadth coherent. In “Walk Out” (Away Within, 2024), the dreamy guitar admits a brighter expanse whose openness unsettles memory’s authority. Experiences once held as certainties become translucent under the weight of living. Departure requires a body to move before the mind has ratified every reason, and the music honors the dignity of that delay.

With “Mass Anaesthesia” (A Secret Sound, 2006), public circulation enters the concert’s private anatomy. The echoing guitar opens a channel into the flanged congestion, where traffic acquires the troubling grandeur of a civilization rehearsing its own numbness. Gé floats above it with an aerial detachment that makes the ordinary uncanny. The anonymous procession contains countless interior lives, each passing beyond the observer’s reach. Every vehicle carries an unspoken argument with existence. The song’s eventual viral reach adds another dimension: a recording from 2006 traveled through contemporary networks to become an entrance to Mediavolo for listeners far removed from its release. The live version’s more upbeat, urgent energy gives that belated arrival a pulse. For those brought here through its wider circulation, recognition becomes a return to somewhere they have only just discovered. My encounter with “Misunderstanding” finds a counterpart in theirs. Our routes meet at the same improbable address via music that made room for us before we knew to look for it.

“How Does It End” (A Secret Sound, 2006) poses the concert’s most openly philosophical question. Carquet’s circling bass motifs invite us inward, while Jac and Duhamel lend liquid contours to the invitation. Prigent supplies enough traction for the changing harmonies to remain bodily intelligible. In this balance between seduction and footing, Mediavolo’s songcraft becomes especially vivid. Sparkle has weight; gloom admits motion. Gé gives the question a human duration, letting its implications gather within the time it takes to sing. Fear emerges as a possible organizing principle of a life, sustaining arrangements whose necessity we may never have examined. An answer would have to account for our pleasure in structures that also confine us.

The dulcet axis of “Fanciest Scheme” (Unaltered Empire, 2008) turns that difficulty toward the right to remain different. Its melodic grace accommodates an inward gravity that cannot be tidied into general agreement. Consciousness breaks into dots and dashes, sending imperfect signals between people, gaining force where understanding remains incomplete. After a concert so attentive to estrangement, this closing gesture makes fellowship a demanding proposition. Gé’s embodiment of other lives and her bandmates’ exchanges supply a practical measure of it by receiving another’s experience without requiring it to duplicate one’s own.

I find myself thinking of an undeciphered inscription. Centuries of attention may fail to recover what someone entrusted to a surface, yet the marks retain the fact of an address. A hand once pressed meaning into matter and left it for another consciousness. We might destroy the inscription by polishing it until it resembled an alphabet we already know. Something comparably fragile moves through Mediavolo’s music, especially when Gé gives breath to a life whose circumstances remain distinct from her own. Listening places us before another person’s opacity and asks what care can survive without the reward of complete understanding. There is tenderness in allowing the unknown to retain its markings.

Christy Doran Review for All About Jazz

| Tyran Grillo

Christy Doran’s history with ECM traces a restless path through the guitar’s expressive possibilities, from OM’s combustible blend of rock and free improvisation on sister label JAPO to the intimate experiments of his later collaborations. Throughout, his playing reveals an ear equally attuned to abrasion and delicacy, finding unexpected colors where acoustic resonance meets electronic transformation. A quintessential example is Red Twist & Tuned Arrow, recorded with fellow guitarist Stephan Wittwer and drummer Fredy Studer: a music of intricate exchanges and sudden openings, whose adventurousness carries an unmistakable sense of joy. That spirit continues in his latest record, Disambiguation, a collaboration with tabla player Imran Khan. I have just published my review on All About Jazz, and I invite you to read it and discover where Doran’s ever-curious imagination has taken him next. Click the cover below.

Anthony Baldino: CONVEYOR

| Tyran Grillo

Anthony Baldino’s music seems to emerge from two adjoining rooms whose shared wall has become susceptible to the mold of determination. In one, he designs sound and programs synthesizers for Ludwig Göransson on projects including Venom, Tenet, Black Panther: Wakanda Forever, and Transformers: Rise of the Beasts. In the other, he sits alone among modular systems and vintage machines, teaching private grief to speak through oscillators. Each practice contaminates the other productively. Blockbuster precision enters his independent work, while the freedoms of Los Angeles’ electronic underground haunt his commercial craft. Across his second solo album, CONVEYOR, sound becomes a substance caught between sculpture and combustion, carrying dread before language can domesticate it.

The album began with an image made unbearable by its clarity: Baldino’s mother standing on a conveyor belt traveling toward death while he remains powerless to stop it. The vision gathered force amid his grandfather’s passing, his dog’s death, anxiety surrounding his parents’ mortality, and the suspicion that the world had entered a terminal corridor. Anguish becomes the imperceptible mechanism beneath the day, moving everyone we love toward an absence the mind cannot inhabit. Baldino built these pieces around his Eurorack system and Deckard’s Dream, adding outmoded synthesizers while threading recordings of his grandfather and dog through music informed by IDM, industrial music, metal, and film scores. Released into the circuitry, their voices become unstable presences, fragments of affection wandering between frequencies, close enough to disturb the current yet too distant to hold.

Within the record’s implied world, a nameless protagonist wakes beneath the failing lights of a city abandoned by chronology. Streets advertise pleasures whose consumers have vanished. Towers burn with corporate insignia while elevators ascend without passengers. Screens sell eternity to the dead. “For Death To Come” opens the blinds on this exhausted metropolis, its rolling bass carrying the patience of a verdict already delivered. Fractured transmissions cross the horizon while raw tones scrape silence into finer forms of silence. Outside, a crimson glow divides the skyline. Time has frozen without becoming merciful: debris hangs above an avenue while an explosion waits inside its unfinished flower. Movement belongs only to the solitary figure walking through the galactic pause before some unseen hand restarts the catastrophe. Baldino’s synths turn escape into a spiritual problem. Survival promises only another conscious mile.

“Leave The Reminder” appears farther on as a district of radiant keys and nervous percussion, where memory stutters under the weight of being carried forward. The central figure enters a club beneath a ruined transit station. No bodies occupy the floor, although automated light and bass keep the room dancing. Chord swells preserve an era when listening required no public evidence and a song could live entirely within its recipient. Disembodied impulses gather into a hymn for the unborn, moving without witnesses or the tribunal of visibility. Inside the rhythm, a tender, damaged recording surfaces, then dissolves before identity fastens around it. Remembrance cannot retrieve the lost, the traveler realizes. It gives absence a nervous system, which Baldino crafts from gleaming abrasion.

Beyond the station lies the technological undertow of “Dark As Sleep,” a void generated by machines seeking release from matter. The city thins into scorched plains threaded with fiber-optic roots. Satellites drag broken halos through orbit; buried servers dream on behalf of a species that misplaced its future. As the traveler crosses, inner and outer life collapse. Angels rise with ash in their mouths, demons descend carrying instruments of impossible mercy, and their encounter opens a passage between rival eternities. To dream here is to live on one’s own terms, yet freedom exacts a toll. Each step requires surrendering a former self, leaving translucent skins behind. Metallic convulsions suggest that perseverance becomes another machine when pain is merely outrun. Baldino refuses easy deliverance. His traveler presses onward while facing every discarded version of the person they once believed they had to be.

That reckoning leads to “A Sudden Crumbling Into Ruin,” where gunfire and corroded broadcasts collapse history into simultaneous debris. The wanderer enters a battlefield whose causes have been erased. Symbol-less flags remain; orders crackle from speakers whose armies became dust generations earlier. Fragmentary memories mingle with interrupted signals until private regret and public failure share a frequency. Unlaid plans accumulate as phantom roads promising destinations that disappeared before departure. Every route converges upon “Holding, Waiting,” an immense terminal built for an answer that may never arrive. Departure boards cycle through extinct alphabets, and benches hold the impressions of bodies absent for centuries. Beneath an artificial moon, broken politics washes into white noise, letting the heart redraw its coordinates with each beat. At the edge of perception, a wing flutters behind a sealed gate, carrying the final tremor of a love that never entered history.

Baldino makes this middle passage especially potent by resisting narrative comfort. The record’s machinery convulses with pangs of sorrow, yet never impersonates a human mourner. Its compassion emerges through other means. Dissonance excavates chambers beneath feeling, revealing that dread can contain awe without ceasing to be dread. CONVEYOR understands cinematic scale as an instrument of intimacy: the horizon expands until one remembered voice becomes its gravitational center. What initially resembles apocalypse gradually reveals itself as consciousness stripped of distraction, a psychic wasteland where mortality cannot be outsourced to abstraction. The protagonist’s journey therefore bends inward even as it continues across physical terrain. Every ruined structure is also a failed defense against impermanence. Every transmission asks whether love survives as memory or whether memory is simply the shape love takes after losing its object.

Then “Lifted From Lifetimes Away” alters the album’s gravity. The terminal ceiling opens onto a realm outside inherited time, and the traveler rises through it without triumph. Death recedes to a whisper on the lips of figures stranded beyond distant access points, but immortality has not arrived. What changes is the central figure’s relation to motion. Until this point, the conveyor has represented helpless passage, the mechanism carrying beloved bodies toward disappearance. From above, its belts form a vast script written across the wasteland, each line composed of lives migrating beside one another for brief intervals. No single rider can halt the system, though every touch changes what the next person carries. The traveler has searched for a refuge beyond loss and instead discovers continuity within contact: a hand steadied and an animal’s devotion translated into current. Mercy becomes less a pardon than a method of transmission.

“Live Forever” rises from a cloud of dissonance as the traveler returns to the surface. Synthesizers push through the haze until accumulated pain breaks into an electrified physical release. The title sheds its boastful armor. Living forever no longer means securing a permanent place on the leaderboard of recall. It names the instant when a finite life passes something tender into another finite life, accepting alteration as the cost of endurance. The traveler walks back through the city while time resumes around them. Debris completes its fall. The waiting explosion spends its force against the horizon. Screens dim while elevators stop; the underground club releases its final pulse into empty streets. None of this resembles restoration. The wasteland remains wounded, yet its wounds cease demanding an impossible cure. They become openings through which the dead continue to modify the living.

This is where Baldino’s technical discipline and private mourning align most closely. His machines do not conquer mortality. They translate its terrible rhythm into a helpless luminosity that never pretends to save us. The protagonist finally reaches the conveyor seen at the journey’s beginning and steps onto it willingly. Ahead stands the mother figure, still traveling beyond reach. Behind gather the grandfather and the dog beside innumerable strangers whose losses fed the city’s electrical veins. The traveler cannot move closer to any of them because the distances remain fixed. Yet beneath everyone’s feet, the belt carries more than bodies toward an ending. It carries gestures forward, including those too small to recognize themselves as inheritance.

The unexpected refuge of CONVEYOR lies in this reversal. Mortality, the thief stalking love, also provides the limit that permits love to be given, because a gift without an ending would never have to leave its giver. The lone figure opens an empty hand and discovers that emptiness is not proof of failure. It is evidence that something has been passed on. In the final illumination, solace becomes neither destination nor escape but the courage to serve as a temporary passage for what no one can own. The conveyor continues beneath the stars, bearing each life into darkness, while through the traveler moves a warmth shared by the dead but owned by no one.

Wolfgang Muthspiel Review for All About Jazz

| Tyran Grillo

My latest review for All About Jazz documents my thoughts on this phenomenal new album by Wolfgang Muthspiel’s “Chamber Trio,” featuring trumpeter Mario Rom and pianist Colin Vallon alongside the guitarist. Drummerless jazz of the highest order that fans of Muthspiel’s work on ECM won’t want to miss. Click the cover below to read more.

Simone Dinnerstein review for Sequenza 21

| Tyran Grillo

My latest review for Sequenza 21 is of pianist Simone Dinnerstein’s first album dedicated to the music of Philip Glass. Leading her string ensemble, Baroklyn, she charts the expansive waters of the composer’s suite from The Hours and the Tirol Concerto. Click the cover below to read more.

Joseph Branciforte & Jozef Dumoulin: ITERAE

| Tyran Grillo

When entering ITERAE, we realize that it has already entered us. In this realm of post-glitch and digital bliss, an unsettling current draws us inward, threading its way through our attention until we no longer stand outside it. By the time orientation falters, we have already been absorbed into its matrix. This first collaboration between Joseph Branciforte and Jozef Dumoulin feels less like a beginning than a recognition, as though the music had been forming elsewhere long before it reached our ears. The eight-part work makes room for whatever meanings we bring to it, yet those meanings do not remain intact. They splinter, becoming granular, each shard holding its own quiet tremor.

Although the sounds are free-flowing and, for all intents and purposes, “abstract,” something organic guides their unfolding. There is a sense of inevitability that breathes through the music, as if each gesture were the continuation of an unseen process. Both performers have examined the inner workings of the Fender Rhodes with an intimacy that borders on anatomical devotion. Branciforte approaches from a cerebral vantage, tracing circuitry and signal, while Dumoulin leans into resonance and touch. Their shared immersion in improvisation suggests a practice that listens as much as it acts. Electroacoustic molecules begin to feel like carriers of a subtler vitality, and what emerges, though rooted in the present, carries a strange immunity to time.

With an instrument each at their disposal, they shape and process their sounds in distinct ways, allowing differences to coexist without friction. Branciforte’s live editing system introduces another dimension, folding moments back into themselves so that traces of what has just passed continue to sing within what is becoming. The effect is neither nostalgic nor recursive in a conventional sense. Memory behaves more like a living texture, constantly reabsorbed into the present. Across 70 minutes, a broader tapestry takes form, one that does not declare its structure outright yet reveals a continuity of reception. By the end, something in us aligns more closely with itself, though the nature of that alignment resists easy articulation.

What’s astonishingly heartfelt about this record is the unforced way in which it unfolds. Each shift of color, light, and texture feels intentional without ever seeming imposed. The music often takes on a visual quality, as though it were painting in slow motion across an inner field of perception. At certain points, the effect is hymnal, repetition carrying a quiet sense of ritual that feels open rather than doctrinal. Elsewhere, the atmosphere turns distinctly technological, articulating patterns that seem native to machines yet remain accessible to human feeling. While Branciforte and Dumoulin could easily construct overwhelming densities, their attention turns toward the interstices, the fine cracks where detail becomes a form of revelation.

Skips and starts establish a kind of pulse, though one that resists regularity. In the spaces where expectation wavers, something almost biological begins to stir, hovering between unease and resolution, never fully committing to either. As the sonic architecture takes on a more metallic sheen, a subtle shift occurs in its sensory character. There is a taste to it, faintly coppery, as if the sound itself were brushing against the elemental conditions from which life emerges. This grounding in the fundamental gives the less anchored passages a surprising sense of familiarity.

The continuity of the work remains one of its quiet marvels. Emotional currents, physical responses, and fragments of memory intertwine in ways that feel both intimate and expansive. The initial unsettlement does not disappear, yet it softens as the music offers points of illumination along the way. There is always a sense of contact, as though the sound remains attuned to our capacity to receive it. Nothing is pushed beyond reach, even when clarity seems just out of grasp.

When rhythms become more defined, they resemble presences moving alongside one another rather than structures imposed from above. Listening begins to feel like watching language dissolve into color, each shade carrying a meaning that cannot be translated back into words. Melodic gestures arise from the digital substrate as complete entities, already aware of their own contours. Direction loses its usual significance, and the distinction between forward and backward begins to blur.

Near the end, distortion enters with a subtle insistence, though it never threatens to overwhelm. Instead, it refines the material, drawing out a clarity that feels paradoxically linked to decay. Each iteration preserves a certain purity, suggesting an affection for entropy rather than a resistance to it.

Zosha Warpeha: I grow accustomed to the dark

| Tyran Grillo

Zosha Warpeha’s I grow accustomed to the dark is an inquiry into what it means for a body to become an instrument and for an instrument to remember the body. The Hardanger d’amore does not sit across from her as an object. It leans inward, absorbs breath, and answers pulse with vibration. A background in Norwegian folk traditions and avant-garde improvisation finds a meeting point here, though neither discipline remains intact in any familiar sense. Folk memory dissolves into texture, improvisation into ritual. Two long-form compositions unfold as if time itself were refusing linearity. Recorded at ISSUE Project Room, the space enters the music as an active presence. Reverberation blooms into another voice, sympathetic strings responding not just to the bow but to the architecture surrounding them. What emerges is a shifting threshold where presence flickers into absence, where sound takes on the density of touch.

“filament” begins with an instinct older than language. Tenderness arises from a delicate pressure that suggests both care and necessity, as though survival itself depends on sustaining contact. Each stroke carries the weight of a soul learning how to remain intact—lingering, circling, studying its own fade. Repetition takes on the character of incantation, not for trance alone but for the deepening of relation. Hair against string begins to resemble skin against skin, or nerve against thought. Drones hover as suspended light, while dissonances pulse with organic inevitability, neither resolved nor resisted.

Warpeha’s voice enters from another layer of perception. It threads through the field, a flicker at the edge of visibility. Her timbre carries the ghost of song without settling into melody. One hears the trace of a tradition remembered imperfectly, or remembered so deeply that it has been released from the prison of notation. The voice lifts and dissolves, leaving behind a residue that clings to the ear, closer to scent than sound. Stone becomes sediment, sediment becomes something combustible, something capable of holding light. Beneath everything, a pulse persists. It waits, patient and uninsistent, suggesting that continuity is not the absence of rupture but its quiet companion.

“visual purple” shifts the terrain. The opening pizzicato arrives as distant movement, each pluck a footstep landing with deliberate hesitation. The instrument searches its own interiors as sympathetic strings awaken in response, their afterimages suggesting hidden circulatory systems, an anatomy in fragments. Warpeha’s voice here is less tethered to breath as we know it. It gestures rather than declares, marking space with shapes that resist translation. Each utterance resembles a glyph drawn in darkness, meaningful without the need for deciphering. Language becomes a field of suggestions rather than a system of signs.

The music inhabits a space of memory that erodes as it reveals. There are dust particles in the air, remnants of objects that disintegrate upon recognition. The listener is not asked to reconstruct what has been lost. Presence with disappearance becomes the central task. In this sense, the instrument functions as both archive and agent of forgetting, holding traces even as it transforms them beyond recovery. When the bow returns, its entrance whispers a quiet finitude. The contact feels irreversible, as though a threshold has been crossed. Tension between pitches opens a space where ambiguity turns luminous. Interpretation rises, then falls away. What remains is immediacy, a clarity that stands apart from explanation.

Across the album, the instrument becomes a site where the performer encounters herself anew. Playing turns into a negotiation between intention and response. The body initiates, the molecules answer, and somewhere between them a third presence gathers. It belongs neither to performer nor listener but exists in perpetual relation.

The deepest truth reached for here is that identity is shaped through sounding, continuously altered by what passes through it. All of which leaves us with a choice: to close our eyes against the light or remain within the field and allow what arises to alter the contours of our being, one shadow at a time.

I grow accustomed to the dark is available on Bandcamp here.