The benefits of this modus operandi are manifold. With an ever-changing array of musicians, Hour is uniquely resistant to retreading old ground, each recording session or performance shaped by the configuration present in that specific moment. But more importantly, the sheer breadth of talent available to Cormier-O’Leary allows him to explore themes which might too great to confront on his own. Consider Hour’s new full-length, Ghost Bridge, set for release this autumn via Dear Life Records. An album which, as per its title, repurposes an unrealised film concept in which a bridge literally starts to dematerialise into thin air. With a sound decidedly cinematic, Hour use this image as a starting point for a far wider meditation on loss and disappearance. What it means to be on one side of something without hope of crossing over. The helplessness of being stranded in any given location. Not to mention the almost dreamlike experience of witnessing a tangible aspect of your world suddenly vanish in an instant. How do we live with the knowledge this will happen to people around us, be they lovers or strangers? What would it feel like to take their place?

A thirteen-strong cast of musicians assembled to bring Ghost Bridge to life, and each song was arranged with specific players in mind. To give the full roll call, Cormier-O’Leary is joined by Jason Calhoun, Em Downing, Matt Fox, Peter Gill (2nd Grade, Friendship), Pat Keen, Lucas Knapp, Evan McGonagill, Peter McLaughlin (Little Wings), Frank Meadows (Fust, Dear Life co-owner), Keith J. Nelson, Abi Reimold, Adelyn Strei (Skullcrusher) and Heeyoon Won (Boosegumps). You only have to listen to the subtly mesmeric title track to appreciate the newfound depth of this iteration of Hour. A song, clocking in at near ten minutes which must rank among Cormier-O’Leary’s most ambitious and thematically loaded to date. Nothing is hurried, yet there is nevertheless an urgency to the poignant, curious sound. The level of detail is striking but there is no ounce of ostentation. Lesser acts might be overwhelmed if tasked with exploring concepts of loss and mortality, prone to slipping into maudlin excess, but with a unique blend of compassion and abstraction, it seems Hour are up to the task.

The song is paired with an equally abstract and evocative short film made by Cormier-O’Leary and his collaborators themselves. “I was transfixed by this triangle hallway in one of the buildings at the Circus Campus in Germantown, so I gathered my friends Buzz Lombardi, Heeyoon Won, Hayden Hall, Lucas Knapp and Silas Reidy to make the video there,” he explains. “We spent most of our time lighting the hallway so Silas’ long, slow walk towards the camera would be disorienting with him emerging from and descending back into shadow.” Watch in full below:

Ghost Bridge will be released on the 9th October via Dear Life Records and you can pre-0rder it from the Hour Bandcamp page.

Band photo by William H. Travis, album cover photography by Matthew Chasney, layout by Francis Lyons

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Back in 2022, Texas-based songwriter and DIY stalwart Brody Price released Win A Trip To Palm Springs, what we described as “an authentic engagement with the difficult side of life” which nevertheless “refus[ed] to succumb to maudlin yearning or fatalistic cynicism, instead working with enough patience and curiosity to allow the full spectrum of emotions to coexist.” Now Price is set to return with brand new record Leaf Miner’s Daughter, to be released via Gar Hole Records this autumn, and single and album opener ‘Breathing Again’ suggests he is once more prepared to wrestle with hope and despair in his distinctive alt-country style. The subject matter could hardly be darker, dealing with the real-life instance when Price and his wife tried to help two victims of a shooting outside their home in Fort Worth (one of which died while they administered CPR), and again the song’s mission seems to be an attempt to fight off complete doom despite its constant assault. How does one go on living in a country (or indeed entire world) which seems to be collapsing? What hope can be scavenged within the ruins of this disaster? Brody Price might not have the answers, but he’s out there trying to help all the same.

Leaf Miner’s Daughter will be released on the 9th October via Gar Hole Records and you can pre-order it now.

Charlotte Greve – Own Lap

“Considers the multitudes which exist within any one person, and how this array of dimensions is shaped and grown by our immediate surroundings [with a] bright and curious sound, based around syncopated vocals and drum machine beats, [which] flickers like a disco ball in uneven light, as though with every twist and turn, Greve shows a slightly different face to herself, each just as vivid and shining as the last.” So we wrote of ‘Membranes’, the lead track from Charlotte Greve‘s new album WATERBODIES, forthcoming via New Amsterdam. The German-born, Brooklyn-based composer, singer and saxophonist has now shared latest track ‘Own Lap’, the clearest indication yet of both the record’s playful invention and the scale of the intentions which underpin it. Dedicated to her late grandmother and two friends who have moved through adversity, “strong people,” as Greve describes, “who had the ability and strength to keep their head up and keep going,” the song is an eleven-minute epic brought to life with full orchestral grandeur which nevertheless never loses sight of the personal amid the sweeping majesty. Or rather, it is a song which locates the majesty within the personal experience of the everyday.

Jason Calhoun – Enjoy Losing

Last month we introduced revelations of divine love, the new full-length album from Jason Calhoun coming soon via Dear Life Records. It’s the latest offering from “an artist on a mission, or else just asking questions,” as we put it, “someone in perpetual search for something elusive, be it mere solace or transcendence”. The release could be seen as a kind of metacommentary on this quest, coming to understand how the revelations of its title will not arrive as a grand epiphany but in the accumulated experience gleaned from day to day. Latest single ‘Enjoy Losing’ is an embodiment of this spirit, delving into the piecemeal nature of anything artistic or spiritual, as well as the patience required as a result. “[The] title comes from playing chess.com on my phone,” as Calhoun explains:

Going in I decided I wouldn’t learn how to win through theory, but instead through trial and error. I really had to learn to enjoy the game even when I was losing. You can call it poetics if you’re so inclined but that losing process feels tied to my musical and spiritual practice. I’ve learned to be patient with the way my music takes form just as I have tried to learn to welcome difficulty with open arms. The textural piece finds me with a contact mic and a rosary in hand, a representation of my ever-present search for divine love.”

Kate Prascher – They Will Fall Down

After singles ‘Jubilee‘ and ‘Thousand a Million‘, Tennessee-born, Hudson Valley-based songwriter Kate Prascher continues to prepare for the release her new album Sunday Afternoon with latest single ‘They Will Fall Down’. A “collision of the vintage and contemporary is typical of [her] work,” we wrote of her music previously, “Prascher finding fertile ground in the ambiguous space between things, be it mystery and clarity or the old and the new,” and the new song is no exception. A lush and wistful reflection on the end of the world, the track plays as something of a homespun waltz, managing to evoke both the gravity of impending conclusions while retaining a sense of sincerity and fondness too.

Sunday Afternoon will be released on the 28th August via First City Artists.

Matthew Squires & Sunk Coast – What’s Going On?

From ballads about Norm MacDonald to satirical covers of viral conservative country hits, the work of Ithaca, New York-based songwriter Matthew Squires is as surprising as it is inventive. His new project with Zach Totta of Sunk Coast is by no means an exception. Our first taste of new EP Easy Answers To Harder Questions, single ‘Wing Song’ showed how quirk is not mutually exclusive to emotion (“with vocals that rival Daniel Johnston in their ability to echo Kermit the Frog,” we wrote, “the song is classic Matthew Squires, proving that genuinely compassionate music need not leave playfulness or strangeness at the door”), something which latest number ‘What’s Going On?’ really hammers home. With a zany yet caustic personality which would make Thomas Pynchon proud, the song paints a picture of the contemporary US in all of its bizarre idiosyncrasies. But for all of its cartoonish colour and wit, the tone remains locked in a kind of reflective melancholy, as though beneath the dazzling surfaces lies a fundamental emptiness which the modern day has no way to fill.

Max Bien Kahn – Neighbours

San Francisco-born, New Orleans-based songwriter Max Bien Kahn is preparing to release his fifth solo album Baby Green this autumn, a record which looks to capture the full spectrum of life in all its bittersweet nuance. The large and the small sit side by side, bereavement next to dancing in bars, favourite shirts alongside fatherhood, as MBK collapses the line between the significant and insignificant to evoke the very fabric of existence and all its messy threads. The result is tender, often joyous and occasionally heartbreaking, songs which treat life as a privilege no matter what any one day might throw at you. Take latest single ‘Neighbours’, which manages to mine the ostensibly mundane experience of nodding hello to a familiar face in the neighbourhood for all of its uplifting delight, and all without a trace of irony, even if the repeated assertion “I’m not afraid of strangers” suggests something telling about the contemporary moment.

You see that guy down the street
He lives right around the corner
He’s such a friendly neighbor
We’re gonna say hello

He’s taking out the trash now
Rolling the cans to the curb
I’m not afraid to stop and say hello
To all my neighbors

Baby Green will be released on the 23rd October and you can pre-order it now.

Old Man of the Woods – Venus in Virgo

Earlier this year, Miranda Elliott’s Old Man of the Woods released album Cape Perpetua, an album of songs which “employ a certain minimalism, especially in their beginnings, though as a means rather than an end,” as we wrote in our review, “As though by stripping down the present into an ascetic simplicity, Old Man of the Woods is able to push through into another world entirely.” Now Elliott has returned with new single ‘Venus in Virgo’, what the Seattle-based artist describes as “a spell for self preservation” which bends towards post-punk with taut, angular tones and punchy rhythms. But above this newly propulsive groundwork remain the ethereal tones of the project, Elliott’s vocals swirling and slurring with what could be sensual suggestion or sardonic bite.

Protomartyr – Sounds We Cannot Hear

“Another eighty-one dead since dawn / Spiders crawling ‘cross the ceiling / Next door there’s voices moaning / Can’t tell if they’re coming or going.” So sings Joe Casey in the opening lines of Protomartyr’s new single ‘Sounds We Cannot Hear’, the first taste of the Detroit outfit’s seventh studio album, Hotel Usona. Charged with horror and laced with sly humour, the song introduces an album which promises to confront the contemporary American moment in all its pathetic neuroses and heinous excesses, Protomartyr evolving their sound with the addition of horns, tubular bells, xylophone and more, yet retaining the intensity which has long marked them as the real deal amid a crowd of post-punk pretenders. Just consider the needling dread of the opening segment, or indeed Casey’s repeated refrain at the close, a chorus which starts like something of a defeated elegy and rises in sheer desperation. Is there any agency left in a society which engineers gross inequality at home and mass slaughter abroad? If this track is anything to go by, we’re left with two meagre options. We can bury our heads in technological distraction and try to pretend it isn’t happening, or, like poet Hart Crane who is referenced in the second verse, choose to dive headfirst from the ship into the oblivion below.  Watch the video directed by Danny Scharar and Harris Mayersohn, and starring comedian/actor Nate Varrone, below:

Hotel Usona will be released on the 25th September via Domino and you can pre-order it now.

Shredded Sun – Cruel Streak

“Their sound pulls ingredients from all corners of the indie rock pantry, resulting in something that feels both reassuringly familiar and freshly unpredictable.” That’s how we described Chicago‘s Shredded Sun back in June, as jangly-yet-gritty single ‘Skyscrapper’ introduced new full-length Never Odd or Even, coming soon via Repeating Cloud. With the release of the album now just over a week away, Shredded Sun have returned with brand new track, ‘Cruel Streak’. As the title might suggest, this number shows a more raucous dimension to the Shredded Sun sound, though again the swagger and attitude are cut with a certain nostalgic tone too, as though within the boisterous momentum lies a wistful longing for something more.

waltzerr – ciggy b

Later this month, Seattle-based indie rock outfit waltzerr will release new full-length Tomorrow Will Be Better via nonprofit label Share It Music. Originating as the solo project of vocalist and songwriter Emily Waltzer, waltzerr has now grown into a trio with the addition of Anthony Coraggio (bass) and Schuyler Jensen (guitar), and has made a mark in the local music scene with a mix of high energy and unguarded emotion. This combination forms the heart of the new album, Waltzer and co. finding room for both confessional quiet and full-blown catharsis, as demonstrated by vivid lead single, ‘ciggy b’. For while the track might be reflective in tone, looking back on a past relationship and what might have been, the sound itself has its eyes firmly on the horizon, galloping forward with considerable momentum and heft. Who says nostalgia can’t pack a real punch?

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It could be tempting to view such efforts with pessimism. This prolific artist, releasing record after record, still covering new ground in search of a solution to the problem. Only to assume such a position would be to a) underestimate the achievements of Calhoun’s work to date, and b) misunderstand the reason the search is perpetual in the first place. It is not that there is no answer out there, more the answer needs to be continual. Rarely are we so lucky as to get a blinding light along the road to Damascus. The path to comfort and contentment is more like a thirst to be sated. We must constantly go to the well.

With this in mind, Jason Calhoun’s latest album, revelations of divine love, could be read as both a continuation of his ongoing project and a metacommentary on its purpose. Coming next month via Dear Life Records, the album takes its title from the collected works of Julian of Norwich, using the wisdom of the fourteenth-century anchoress as the catalyst for a meditation on what it means to find contentment. “Julian of Norwich says ‘All shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well’,” Calhoun explains. “These days, I’ve been having my doubts that this is true. As no solution to the issue at hand, I look for the revelations of divine love in my life, and I find them—in my partner asleep on the floor in our studio, my survival of a social interaction with a stranger, being bad at chess.” None of these things can flip a switch and change a life, few will necessarily count for much a week or month away, but this steady accumulation of ephemeral moments is what sustains a life. Gives it colour and warmth and, ultimately, meaning.

The result is unsurprisingly intimate, if still shot through with the very sense of restlessness that drives its creation, meaning Calhoun’s picture is far more complex than a simple catalogue of sentimental charms. Consider the latest single ‘what we deserve’. An embodiment of the concision and curiosity which marks the record, the song clocks in barely over a minute yet is pulled in every direction by colourful lines of synths and below that a pounding drum which persists undistracted, ensuring the force of these flourishes is limited. As though for all the small delights we find before ourselves, the beat of something larger will always sound behind us. “‘what we deserve’ is perhaps the most simultaneously playful and relentless I get on this record, Calhoun explains. “The title comes from existential thoughts about daily joys against the backdrop of global politics […] Something I’ve been thinking about a lot is whether we deserve the mess we’re in and whether we’re in it due to our own callow joys.”

Watch the track’s accompanying video, courtesy of Calhoun’s dog and a Go Pro camera:

revelations of divine love will be released on the 7th August via Dear Life Records and you can pre-order it now from the Jason Calhoun Bandcamp page.

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The cover painting and title, is a nod to Bottles of Hope For Gaza, where in Egypt, bottles containing rice, flour, and beans were thrown into sea in hopes that they would reach the shores of Gaza. In organizing this project, I hope to offer encouragement to anyone in the music community, to speak up in song and to utilize our collective power. I believe it is vital to our own hearts, and our lives as artists, to empathize and show empathy to this cause.

All proceeds of the release will be donated to ANERA, a charity which offers a whole suite of humanitarian aid and emergency relief in Gaza, as well as across the wider Middle East. The organisation’s motto is “Where hope finds a way,” a sentiment more relevant than ever. Because for all of the hand-wringing and well-intentioned prayers, what the people need now is action. And the only way to achieve the required response is for wide swathes of those watching on to roll up their sleeves and do anything they can. Songs of Hope for Gaza is just one small effort to add to this collective action, and one which will hopefully inspire others to lend their energy to the drive. Victoria invokes a quote from Woody Guthrie’s Bound for Glory to encapsulate the spirit of the release:

All of this talking about what’s up in the sky, or down in hell, for that matter, isn’t half as important as what’s right here, right now, right in front of our eyes. Things are tough. Folks broke. Kids hungry. Sick. Everything. And people has just got to have more faith in one another, believe in each other. There’s a spirit of some kind we’ve all got. That’s got to draw us all together.

Songs of Hope for Gaza will be released on the 28th October via Pretty Purgatory and Dear Life Records and you can pre-order it now.

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The Friendship sound has always existed within an ambiguous space. Each release plays as a stagnant dispatch from a world in motion, Wriggins left to pick the bones out of any given moment in futile hope of making sense of his existence. The grand narratives of life—be that love, work, success or self-improvement—are often revealed to be emptier than he had hoped, yet the inverse is also shown to be true. The ordinary, the everyday, that is where the sublime lurks for those with the time or motivation to look.

Caveman Wakes Up promises to delve deeper into this idea, a record which finds the familiar vocals and lyricism supported by Friendship’s most ambitious and exploratory sound to date. The core group of Peter Gill (guitar, synth, vibraphone, vox), Michael Cormier-O’Leary (drums, percussion, piano, organ, synth, vibraphone, drum machine, string and woodwind arrangement), Jon Samuels (bass, synth) and Wriggins (vox, guitar) are supported with occasional appearances from Adelyn Strei (flute, clarinet) and Jason Calhoun (violin), and the result further tests the boundaries between country and its adjacent genres—leaning out across the various schools of folk rock and even further still.

‘Free Association’ is the ideal entry point to this freshly curious sound. “Another one about love and other people and how the only hope we’ve got in the search for meaning is to make it up,” as Wriggins told Stereogum. “The Mellotron sax and voice patch were both jokes that we ended up loving. Also the only song with synth bass. We’re proud as hell of the production.”

Watch the video directed by Zach Puls below:

Caveman Wakes Up will be released on the 16th May via Merge Records and you can pre-order it now from the Friendship Bandcamp page.

Cover art: Matthew Reed, Tenant’s Rights, acrylic on canvas. Design: Daniel Murphy

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Originating as a narrative poem, The Chairman Dances‘ new album Evening Song traces the early days of a nascent relationship. A seminarian and a drummer mutually enamoured with one another, caught in the heady space of attraction and mystery, hungry to learn everything there is to know about the other. Lead single ‘We Rifled Through’ drops us into the middle of this burgeoning intimacy, a scene which might appear mundane elevated by its details. A snapshot of two people meeting which not only evokes the connection growing between them, but the paths their lives have taken to lead them to that moment.

“Your parents give you this?” “Which? No that’s mine.
I’m the lone church goer.” “How does that happen?”
“One day, I went to church. I stayed. That’s it.”
“That’s it? How did you know to go?” “I stole
a book with an address.” Chris laughs. “You what?”
“You know those bins that sit outside of schools—
you put your textbooks in them when you’re done,
maybe a blanket; someone comes and drives
them off to needy kids? One day, my friends
and I—we’re young, we’re bored—we rifled through.
There, at the bottom, four or five of…”, she points.

Charlotte Jacobs – mala

Speaking of narrative poems, Belgium-born, New York-based vocalist, composer, and producer Charlotte Jacobs is releasing debut full-length a t l u s next month via New Amsterdam Records, and the album’s vocal-centric style could be said to represent its own contribution to the form. Jacobs’s spoken word delivery is held within soundscapes which blur the line between avant pop and contemporary classical, the style marrying the intentional craft of minimalism with intricate detail to create something almost otherworldly. Single ‘Mala’ highlights how the vocals serve as the anchor and guide for the listener. The thread which leads them through this strange and beautiful world.

Honeypuppy – Understatement

The led by songwriter Josie Callahan and featuring Adam Wayton (bass), Will Wise (lead guitar) and Jack Colclough (percussion), Honeypuppy is an Athens, Georgia-based project based on fun and mischief. The first in a new series of monthly singles ahead of forthcoming release DIRTY TV, ‘Understatement’ serves as the perfect introduction for anyone unacquainted with Callahan and co. A song typical of the band’s bittersweet sound where sincere emotion and sardonic wit sit side by side and neither comes out on top.

DIRTY TV is out later this year on Indecent Artistry.

jason calhoun + cla-ras – cruel work carols

Recorded for a tour earlier this year, cruel work carols is a new split release from jason calhoun and Jeremy Ferris’s cla-ras. The pair have long held our attention with their use of sound and textures. The former most recently with small circle on Dear Life Records, a release which blended “organic and synthetic noises into a kind of constellation,” we wrote in our review, “small points to grasp as we move downward, to contemplate in all of their fleeting insignificance. And the latter on releases like Five clusters, “with subtle intricacies growing from every crevice,” we wrote of Ferris’s work, “its ambient folk style sees the organic slowly overwhelm the electronic, evoking ecology’s reclamation of abandoned industrial land. cruel work carols is no less evocative, calhoun offering a world of static and scrambled light and cla-ras something altogether weightier and stark. But although quite different, both suggest some approaching transcendence, however ambiguous that force might be.

cruel work carols is out now and available from Bandcamp.

kennedy mann – On Video

“I watch my life on video / How the time just seems to fly / I put my whole life on video / With all the things that slip my mind.” So sings kennedy mann on deliciously nostalgic new single ‘On Video’, the latest solo track from an artist you might know as having fronted Philly dream pop outfit Highnoon. Mann’s previous singles were hushed lo-fi affairs, though while this maintains the emotional resonance, the sound possesses a layer of cinematic gloss fitting for the title. Ava Mirzadegan adds backing vocals to lift the track further, leading to something both trapped by and longing for the ever-alluring past.

Like how everything looks different
But I still feel the same
Holding onto glimpses
It’s better off that way

Kitty Fitz – Life of the Party

Last year the London-based songwriter Kitty Fitz put out All My Own Stunts via Sad Club Records, an EP which mixed equal parts vulnerability and charm to offer a sound at once laid back and emotionally charged. New EP The Man in Me, coming later this autumn via Sad Club once again, promises to build upon these foundations and push the Kitty Fitz sound further. Single ‘Life of the Party’ holds all of the tenderness and self-deprecative wit that made the previous EP so special, but held within a vivid pop sound that nods to the likes of Caroline Polachek. “At its heart it’s a song about social anxiety, which is something I’ve always wanted to write a song about” Fitz explains. “My mental health has been a really turbulent journey, and as someone who naturally comes off as very extroverted, I wanted to expose that I have always really struggled to fit in.”

Watch the visualiser by Amy Ryder below:

The Man in Me is out on the 31st October via Sad Club Records.

Klô Pelgag – Sans visage

This autumn sees the release of Abracadabra, the new album from Quebec‘s Klô Pelgag on Secret City Records which channels the magic, playfulness and wishful thinking of its titular exclamation in search of some miraculous answer to life’s questions. Latest single ‘Sans visage’ is an alluring introduction to Pelgag’s vivid brand of dream pop. An enveloping experience earnest in its emotion yet full of experimentation and curiosity. If, at its heart, Abracadabra is a spell designed in hope of or belief in the transformative potential of fun, then ‘Sans visage’ signals how such an incantation might be delivered with a straight face.

You have the clover and I, the luck
It seems to me
That we share the same silence
Without understanding
That time is not what changes us
That no trap has managed to catch us

Watch the video by Laurence Baz Morais below:

Abracadabra is out on the 11th October via Secret City Records and you can pre-order it now.

Masayoshi Fujita – Desonata

Migratory, the forthcoming album from Japanese composer, vibraphonist and marimba player Masayoshi Fujita “draw[s] upon the phenomenon of avian migration as a central image,” we wrote in a preview, and explores “the possibilities that exist in the spaces between electronic and classical music.” With the record out at the end of the week via Erased Tapes, Fujita has shared final single ‘Desonata’, and the origins of the track underline the process of experimentation and invention which underpin the release. “I remember when I tried to record the melody for this song. While improvising with the backing track, I was hearing a melody in my head and tried to play it, but somehow I kept hitting different notes than what I wanted,” Fujita explains. “When I listened back, it gave me a strange feeling, but I liked its unique mood and the new image it evoked, so I decided to use it for the song.”

 Robert Ascroft – Empty Pages

Following on from a successful single ‘Faded Photographs’ with Ruth Radelet, Rochester-based musician, producer and artist Robert Ascroft has returned with a new collaborative single, ‘Empty Pages’, on Hand Drawn Dracula. This time Zumi Rosow of The Black Lips fame lends vocals to a song straight out of the seventies. Derek James channels Mo Tucker in his drumming, leading to a beguilingly ambiguous interplay between rhythm and fuzz. To top things off, Ascroft puts his expertise in direction and photography to good use with a suitably cinematic video to accompany the track. Check it out below:

‘Empty Pages’ is out now Hand Drawn Dracula and available from Bandcamp.

roman around – Moves

We’ve written about Roman Rivera’s roman around a few times in recent times, appreciating the way they use a wide palette of post-punk, pop and R&B sensibilities to challenge the norm, be that of genre or gender. Again out via Trailing Twelve Records, new single ‘Moves’ continues the mission with an energetic examination of loss and adversity, or more specifically how to survive and thrive in the face of them. “‘Moves’ encapsulates the pivotal moments of my youth,” Rivera explains. “These experiences pushed me to surround myself with positive influences. My boundaries with love have been continually tested, such as being unable to contact my brother, watching old friends struggle with addiction, and being abruptly cut off by friends without explanation.”

‘Moves’ is out now via Trailing Twelve Records.

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Next month sees the release of small circle, a new Jason Calhoun album on Dear Life Records which follows up notebook and subsequent release ben c, this is for you by returning to the sensations experienced at the monastery. Bathed in quiet and lacking the tonal direction of its predecessors, the record works to conjure a sense of spiritual contemplation. Silence not as some absence but rather the fundamental element behind everything. If notebook left little space to hide, then small circle eradicates any cover, forcing Calhoun, and by extension to the listener, to face themselves amid an encompassing quiet and dwell on what they find there.

Opening the record and serving as the lead single, the title track welcomes the listener into this space. A brief introduction of quiet clarity which gives way to swirling static, as though the listener is led onto an elevator and lowered slowly into depths of themselves. The downward journey into this chasm is not as dark as one might expect, Calhoun blending organic and synthetic noises into a kind of constellation, small points to grasp as we move downward, to contemplate in all of their fleeting insignificance. Meanwhile, the background drone continues unabated, somehow suggestive of the essential force which must exist at the bottom of the descent.

Photo by Ava Mirzadegan, artwork by Ben Lovell

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Starting with 2019’s practice, Jason Calhoun began recording under his own name, a change that signalled a subtle and slow-dawning stylistic evolution while maintaining the dedication to texture, atmosphere and transient small details that made naps so good. “Calhoun makes music as patient and imperfect as the world around us,” we wrote of practice. “These are songs crafted from thick welcoming textures and a quiet cacophony of thuds and clicks, at once richly detailed and strangely spare, as if Calhoun is holding up a microphone to the hidden corners of the world, all dust motes and creaking beams and pale lemon sunlight.”

This month saw the release of notebook, a brand new album on Dear Life Records which, per the label, finds Calhoun “confronting doubt in his own abilities while affirming his unyielding faith in loved ones.” The songs were initially conceived during a stay at a Trappist monastery, and the quiet and self-reflective surroundings had an undeniable influence on the final work. The album is uncharacteristically direct, stripped of the shroud of field-recorded fuzz that is present on many previous releases, favouring instead a sense of purity and plain intention. Although not necessarily loud in volume, the songs are piercingly honest and ring clear with the vulnerability of opening oneself up to true feelings.

Jason was kind enough to answer some questions on notebook, so read on for insight into it’s creation, battling with self-doubt, and the beautiful cover art.

Hi Jason, thanks so much for taking the time to speak with us. How does it feel to have another album out in the world?

Thanks so much for taking the time to consider what I do! Every time release day comes it honestly always feels like a weight off of my shoulders. It’s hard for me to stop making something, and by the time an album is out I’m usually on to the next thing. I’m glad it’s out for people to hear and maybe I can think about it a little less haha.

Some sense of the record came during a visit to a Trappist monastery. How did the experience inform notebook’s relatively stark, almost ascetic sound?

The beginnings of these pieces were all written out by hand while I was at the monastery, without an instrument to play and hear how they sound. I would hum them to myself and rely on my ear to discern what I was writing. I let those sit for nearly a year before I came back to them; I didn’t feel like I could touch them, or maybe I wasn’t ready. From there other layers were added and more parts were written, but there was a sense of stillness that I wanted to leave; all the first drafts were written as monophonic lines. I didn’t want to take that feeling away. I wanted to leave a lot of space for quiet so I decided to leave out field recordings entirely, allowing the silence to sit and stay somewhere amongst the tones. I found while I was at the monastery that it was impossible to hide from yourself, and I wanted that to be reflected in what I had started there.

I’m fascinated by the collection of sent and unsent text messages that form the album’s epigraph [e.g. “am i getting through to you? am i making sense? this is garbage”]. They act almost like archaeological fragments that give hints to its creation, illuminating the interplay between sincerity and self-doubt that underpins the music. Could you speak a little on the significance of these moods?

I think this might be the most insecure I’ve felt about a record. There doesn’t feel like there’s much space for me to hide. The emotional content of it feels pretty direct and potentially sappy, which is how I strive and fail to be (direct) and often am (sappy) as a person. It’s hard to feel that exposed and not feel insecure about what I am doing. Many of the texts are from myself and Michael Cormier, who runs Dear Life. He’s a very close friend so it felt natural to express my doubts to him even though he was also helping to release the record. His support of this record and past work has been astounding and I am immeasurably grateful. It was his idea to include them.

In complete opposition to that doubt is what Cormier describes as your “unyielding faith in loved ones.” Did you set out to make a record dedicated to those people closest to you, or did their love and support bubble to the surface when you confronted themes so honest and intimate?

I think part of this was just the gratitude I feel for the people that are close to me. While working on this record and feeling these songs out I was deeply feeling how much I love my friends. I felt that because I love them so much, I need to also trust that they’ll tell me the truth and not just tell me what I want to hear when it comes to sharing creatively with them. This can be hard for me to do, and is something I’ve tried really hard to work on for myself.

There’s a thread of miscommunication running through the record, something again captured in the text messages in the liner notes. The cliché is that music communicates what can’t be put into words, but I think in this case the sense extends through the music too. Communicating the miscommunication, as it were. A sense of opacity?

Emotion can be hard to express! At least for me anyway. Sometimes I feel like I’m not being clear enough. Or that it’s not getting through or out of me. I think I was trying to express that part of it as well; the frustration and intensity of trying to be earnest in the midst of often crippling anxiety combined with the fact that there’s someone on the other side receiving it with their own ideas/viewpoints/insecurities. There’s a lot that has to be passed through before it reaches a person. Who knows what it’s like when it gets there.

I wanted to ask about the artwork. It’s an image that draws you in the more you view it. There’s so much going on in what is ostensibly plain image. The juxtaposition of the simplicity of the blue on white and the emerging detail of a magnified view. The incompleteness of the zoomed in image too, the invitation to guess at its larger form. Could you talk a little about how it became the artwork for the album?

When it came time to put the artwork together I knew I wanted Francis Lyons to do it. We’ve worked together musically quite a bit and he’s a close friend, and as such feels a part of these songs. I asked him to do the artwork and the first draft he showed me was a printed mock up of the tape with all the extra pages. I had no idea that he was going to go this far with the design and go above and beyond in the way that he did, and I was just blown away. That sense of thoughtfulness and care and daring really feels like a part of the music too, and so naturally it felt perfect. I haven’t asked him too many questions about where the text comes from, or even what the zoomed in image is from, and I’d rather not know. It feels like some kind of secret that he can have, that feels sacred. I trust it’s coming from a heartfelt place; he’s a close friend after all, and that’s enough.

Notebook is out now via Dear Life Records and you can get it from the Jason Calhoun Bandcamp page.

Photo by Benjamin Torrey, artwork by Francis Lyons

The post Jason Calhoun – Notebook appeared first on Various Small Flames.

“Lengths were determined by the duration of ten separate field recordings,” Calhoun describes. “From these, the general length and progression were determined, even if the final result did not even include the original recording at all.” The recordings became concept rather than content, acting like vague maps that led him down new paths. As Calhoun puts it “this structure felt like a place to begin.”

But the recordings were more than mere timestamps. Calhoun recorded them on what he describes as “a retreat into nature,” and so Jedidiah consequently became an exploration of humankind’s place in a wider ecosystem, and our place as individuals within the boundless plains of both space and time. “I found myself contemplating the smallness of human age in the context of nature,” Calhoun says. “The joy letting go can bring, and the importance of resisting being swept along by capitalist advancement and destruction.”

A sense of the outdoors is enmeshed throughout Jedidiah. Crunchy footsteps offer the nearest thing the album has to percussion, as on ‘lateral moves’ or the stark and sombre title track, while ‘survey’ is built around the sound of what could either be a scrambling gait or something being stuffed into a backpack. There’s a sense of forward motion too on ‘ego death’, footsteps joined by breaths and sniffs, as if we’re right there, hiking alongside Calhoun. It feels like being invited along on a personal journey, and the glimmering drone that envelops everything adds a poignancy, a sense of wordless rumination on the state of things.

Jedidiah find Calhoun in a pretty gloomy place, which I suppose is to be expected from an album with song titles including ‘buried where you live’ and ‘you die and that’s it’. Indeed, he writes about this idea of “sad music” in a piece for I Heart Noise. “The sort of sadness that I was thinking of when starting this new record felt greater than myself,” he describes in a line which quite succinctly captures the feeling of the entire record. Like all of Calhoun’s music, Jedidiah focuses on he incidental in order to capture the universal. There’s no central tragedy, no hackneyed narrative. Instead, Calhoun expresses something ingrained and indistinct, a sorrow that’s woven into even the simplest, most mundane moments.

But that’s not to say Jedidiah is morose and sullen. There’s something calming about it, reassuring even, a sense of recognition for the distillation of sensations we’re all familiar with. There’s quiet transcendence too, for example around the middle section of closer ‘fields’. As Calhoun puts in the album’s description: “Those close to me have said that this album is perhaps darker than previous works, and they may be correct. Within this sadness, there is still a hope, a sense of gentle wonder for what the future may bring.”

Jedidiah is out now on Dear Life Records and available via Bandcamp.

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Black Sea Dahu – Thaw
Will Henriksen – Nothing Left Behind
Dehd – Letter
Hovvdy – Ruin (my ride)
Maya Lucia – preteen
They Are Gutting A Body of Water – french
Jason Calhoun – moving
Dilary Huff – Overused Sayings
Two Meters – The Nightmare
Dead Painters – Marigold
The Deer – Confetti To The Hurricane
Pastel – Moon Landing
Hit Like A Girl – No More Dysphoria
Basement Revolver – Master’s Degree
Bodies on the Beach – Ghost
Highnoon – Lens
Distant Reader – Marie
Drakes Island – 4 Days
Wet Dream – Worried
Best Mann – Must Be Wrong
The Funs – Trains Across The Sea
Ganser – Buio
Nothings – Favorite Shirt
Corinne Sharlet – Hail Mary
ahem – Halloween
Max and the Martians – Please Hold On
A.S. Wilson – Taken Apart
Béret – Book of Hera
Joel Jerome – There’s Nothing Here To Bother You Anymore
Carpet City – Little Longer
Hannah Cranton – Kite
Zachary Lucky – Didn’t Know That You’d Come Along
Wintersleep – Fading Out
Coral – find me wrong
Boo Baby – “Jazz?”
Margaux – Palm

Check out our previous Monthly Roundup playlists, and be sure to read our Reviews and Previews throughout the month.

The post October 2019 Roundup appeared first on Various Small Flames.