The recording project of Chicago-based songwriter Ben Groth, The Child of Eve is preparing to release the full-length Sozo this summer. The record was brought to life together with Grammy Award winning engineer Ben Rawlins and Northern Ireland Music Prize winning engineer Caolán Austin, not to mention drummer Matt Carroll (Finom), bassist Eli Broxham (The Arcadian Wild), vocalist Sara Di Bella (Anuna) and violinist Gareth Quinn Redmond (Glen Hansard, Ye Vagabonds), and the result is every bit as assured as you might expect from such a talented outfit. Take latest single ‘I’m Here’, a song which explores feelings of fear and the ways in which can come to influence our very identity. “This song addresses a kind of fear I wrestle with,”  Groth explains. “One that convinces me to question my worth, to wear a mask and hide myself away. That I’m embarrassing to others.” But rather than allow himself be consumed by the fear, he instead confronts the feeling. Decides to walk through it no matter how uncomfortable it might be.

Dog Shaped – Reason

Rising from the ashes of Sue Your Landlord and featuring Emily Cabarle, Dog Shaped is a new band announcing itself on the New York scene, and debut single ‘Reason’ serves as their calling card. Described by the band as “a love letter and a longing to reconnect with lost childlike wonder,” the track looks to wriggle free from the difficulties and isolation that so often comes with adulthood and instead return to something more tender and curious. What if loneliness need not be the default setting of our existence? What if there’s a path back to kindness and connection once more?

Ead Wood – Emmeline

“A bittersweet slice of wistful reflection, with Soles evoking that strange mix of comfort and loss inherent within any spot of natural beauty.” So we wrote of Ead Wood‘s single ‘Peace in the Pines‘ back in 2024, describing how the Bristol-based project utilised an Americana-adjacent sound to achieve a mood simultaneously upbeat, melancholic and often a little absurd. With new EP Wild Water coming soon via Breakfast Records, Soles and co. are back ‘Emmeline’, a single which continues the introspective nature of the project while widening its focus, serving as a bridge between previous record Cash Mountain and whatever new territory Ead Wood charts next. “I wrote ‘Emmeline’ during a time when I was touring a lot and constantly heading off somewhere else,” Wood explains. “It made me think about what that experience must feel like for the person staying behind. The song is written from my partner’s perspective—that feeling of watching someone rush out the door again while life at home carries on. It’s about love, patience, and the quiet strength of the person who’s always there when you return.”

Eliza Edens – Leash

More than three years since releasing last record We’ll Become the Flowers, Brooklyn‘s Eliza Edens has returned with brand new song ‘Leash’. The standalone single suggests an evolution in style, moving away from the introspective glow of the previous record and stepping into a newfound sassy confidence. “I’m a goddamn killer, ended many things,” they sing in the opening line which rather nicely sets the tone, “fucked up your mind and stole your parents’ wedding ring.” Insistent bass and peppy percussion buoy things along with irrepressible energy, licks of guitar bursting in at intervals as if a metaphor for the abandonment of self-control at the track’s heart. ‘Leash’ “is a tongue-in-cheek, breezy rock song that celebrates the shadow self,” Edens describes, “our darker impulses, the devil on the shoulder, and the cynic inside us all.”

Eric Angelo Bessel – Upstate

After lead track ‘Double Helix’ introduced Mirror At Night B-Sides, a song “dreamlike and drifting,” we wrote, “emerging full of ambiguous meaning as though dug from deep in the distant past or else visiting from some time or space we are yet to encounter,” Eric Angelo Bessel has now shared its partner single ‘Upstate’ to cap off the release. Fans of the project will relish the opportunity to step out of the frame of ordinary existence and delve into this otherworldly soundscape once again. “’Upstate’ feels like a quiet transmission from somewhere beyond time,” Bessel explains of the track, “where memories blur, dreams surface, and sound moves like breath through spaces you can’t quite place but somehow recognize.”

Helenor  Windshield

The recording project of Brooklyn-based songwriter and visual artist David DiAngelis, Helenor serves as a vehicle to explore the twin threads of stasis and change that run through any life, and provides space to reflect on age old existential questions with a fresh, contemporary edge. Released via Mtn Laurel Recording Co., new single ‘Windshield’ is the ideal introduction for the uninitiated, exploring the ways in which we may or may not alter as we grow and come of age, and the curious comfort which might be found in the answer. “I’ve been spending a lot more of my time with children lately, which feels like a portal but also a mirror,” DiAngelis describes. “The mirror part has me feeling like—damn, I’m really not even that much different than who I was at that age. I guess the only way for me to reconcile this is to just remember that every other self-important someone walking by me in New York City is actually just one gigantic child in disguise.”

Mark Trecka – Wake Dance Romance ft. Lead Into Gold

Chicago-born writer, sound artist, performer, and activist Mark Trecka has a new record, ROMANCE WAKE NAMING, coming out next month via LA label The Garrote. Long-time readers will be familiar with his work which roams the outer edges of post-punk, neo-classical and avant garde, combining themes both personal and political in a sound which have said previously “utilis[es] sound to explore a diverse set of styles and themes in a practice as inventive as it is ambitious.” Collaboration is key to Trecka’s practice and the new record is no different. This time industrial music legend Paul Barker (Ministry) both produces and features under his alias Lead Into Gold, helping to create a trip-hop-influenced sound that’s as big and immediate as it is nuanced and experimental. Lead single ‘Wake Dance Romance’ throws the listener headlong into this style. Check it out below.

Pearla – Loved By Me

Pearla has shared a couple of singles from her upcoming new album Song Room in recent weeks, with ‘Be Around‘ and ‘Imagine Your Face‘ introducing a record which inverts the outward view of predecessor Oh Glistening Onion, The Nighttime Is Coming to instead offer a more introspective style. “A survey not of the exterior but interior,” we wrote, “though one which nevertheless finds a vast world full of strange beauty.” With the release fast approaching, Pearla is now back with new track ‘Loved By Me’ which further grounds the emotional core of the record. “This is a song of unconditional love for someone who is used to measuring their worth by external factors,” she says. “I wrote a lot of the songs on this record guided by the question, ‘What is it that my body needs to sing?’ In this case, it was an expression of love, directed toward the more tender parts within myself and the people in my life.” Watch the video by Enne Goldstein below:

Song Room will be released on the 24th April and you can pre-order it now from the Pearla Bandcamp page.

Polhawan – No Sweat

You might know Tim Rowing-Parker as the songwriter behind acts like Woahnows and Immy, the Bristol-based artist using the later to put out a series of scrappy, surf-inflected releases in recent years. His new project Polhawan is both an evolution and revolution of this style, looking to preserve the immediacy and DIY spirit of Immy while pursuing a newfound polish and depth. The result is clearly Rowing-Parker, but also Rowing-Parker as never seen before. Cryptic, strange, fresh and confident. Take single ‘No Sweat’ from debut EP Wild Mountain Time, coming this May via Breakfast Records, which takes a sunny, surfy sound and applies it to something altogether more supernatural. “After a few years living in the country, I moved back to the city, and honestly it kinda freaked me out,” he explains. “To take the edge off the train station each morning I’d block out the noise with headphones, and for some reason this led to listening to loads of supernatural podcasts. It’s quite funny that people recounting the scariest shit that has ever happened to them seemed more comforting to me than existing alongside fellow commuters in the light of day.”

Rare DM – Compliment

The moniker Rare DM might be cryptic (does it refer to direct message? Dungeon master? Dance music?), but the music of Brooklyn-based singer, producer and multi-instrumentalist Erin Hoagg is anything but guarded. Leaning mainly on synths, Rare DM creates an immediate, emotionally charged sound which seduces the listener into its embrace before bearing its messy heart, no matter how revealing or intense the process might be. Later this spring, sees the release of new full-length Attention, and single ‘Compliment’  is typical of its sensual, confronting style. “It is inspired by when you are in a relationship, and someone who you had eyes for (before meeting your s/o) suddenly pays attention to you,” as Hoagg expands. “I was sent a suggestive message from someone, and wasn’t single anymore. As the lyrics share: ‘don’t you worry about it for a second, I can take a compliment’ because hey, I don’t want them to feel embarrassed or bad, they didn’t know that I met someone! This all being said… I can’t control if they are thinking of me. ‘You can’t have it… but you can imagine it’.”

Watch the suitably surreal, suggestive video by Lisa Saeboe below:

Attention will be released on the 29th May and you can pre-order it now from Bandcamp.

Shaina Hayes – Flourish

When not writing songs or touring, Québec-based artist Shaina Hayes runs a vegetable farm in her hometown, a fact which is more than an interesting tidbit to add to a bio. Because spend any time with Hayes’s music and you’ll come to appreciate a kinship between both of these pursuits: an attention to detail, a deep-rooted connection to the land and its life, not to mention an overarching patience that allows her to reflect upon the present with admirable clarity. In preparation for her third full-length, coming soon via Bonsound, Hayes has returned with ‘Flourish’, a suitably earthy, emotive slice of folk which highlights this style perfectly. A well-timed evocation of spring and all of it inherent hopefulness, blooming with an easy warmth as it gestures towards a brighter future of healing and growth. Watch the visualizer by Flavie Lemée below:

‘Flourish’ is out now via Bonsound and available from the usual places.

Will White – When To Stop

Songwriter and composer Will White has long been known for his work with other artists. The Maccabees, 86TVs and Great White Shark are among the acts he’s collaborated with, and he runs a residency at Ron’s cafe in Peckham which has welcomed everyone from Jasper Llewlyn (of Caroline), Katy J Pearson and Will Rees (Mystery Jets) to Florence Welch, Dry Cleaning and Sam Akpro. Even his own project BLANc practised a certain level of distancing from his personal self. But this May sees White step out into the light on his own for the first time with the release of his debut solo album It’s Easy To Let The Thoughts Gain Ground on state51. A record which takes all of the knowledge and experience gained through years spend in the heart of the UK’s artistic community and applies it to his own intimate, reflective brand of indie rock. Latest single ‘When To Stop’ captures the spirit of the release, offering a decidedly compassionate tone that is nevertheless shot through which a rising tension too. Like a picture of someone caught between the shadows of the past and an obscure future, wishing to hope for something better while the world rocks and burns.

Watch the video made by White  alongside Rosie Terry-Toogood below:

It’s Easy To Let The Thoughts Gain Ground will be released on the 1st May via state51 and you can pre-order it now.

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To close out the year, Mark Trecka has unveiled one final single from the album, ‘New Panthalassa’. Trecka originally recorded the track aged twenty, as part of the song ‘Panthalassa’, though revisits it here as a method of both processing of past traumas and celebrating the friendships and collaborations which have persisted across the years. An Heap appeared on the original and Tesnow joins again, helping build a bed of vintage drum machine, tapes, synth and bass guitar above which Trecka’s crooned vocals soar.

Fool Signals is out now and available from the Mark Trecka Bandcamp page.

Photo by Olivier Nemnom

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A song that she says “comes from acknowledging the type of magic that exists all around us and yearning to get a taste of it,” ‘rosemary’ is the new single from addy (the project led by Philadelphia’s Addy Watkins). Her first new music since last year’s temperance, the song takes indie pop and stripped-back folk and refracts them into a new shape entirely, something warm and fond and all-enveloping.  “I was in love with a witch once,” Watkins describes of the song’s inspiration, “who taught me rosemary hung over my bed would help with my crippling nightmares. which it did and still does whenever I remember to hang it.”

Alice Hebborn – Saisons – Movement 2

December sees the release of Saisons, the debut album from Belgian composer Alice Hebborn on Western Vinyl. Created following a move to the countryside, the record draws inspiration from theories of ecofeminism and environmental harmony and presents a world cast volatile and disordered in the wake of human impacts. Across seven movements, built of piano and electronics, Hebborn imagines a different future. One in which humans cease to throw the natural balance and instead become a key link in a harmonious web of reciprocal relationships. Lead single ‘Movement 2’ is “the starting point of Saisons,” Hebborn describes. “It was written in the spring and draws its inspiration from the captivating images of this season: the awakening of nature and our senses, the great activity of all living things.”

Banti Buli – Hennessy Song

“Refusing to commit fully to irony or sincerity […] as though a song about relationships couldn’t really function without equal doses of heartfelt emotion and tongue-in-cheek humour.” So we wrote of Banti Buli‘s ‘Something Like a Honda Odyssey’ last year, a song which mixed languid rhythms with a distinctively verbose lyricism. Ahead of an album due next spring, Banti Gheneti is now back with ‘Hennessy Song’, a track which see the US-based Dutch-Oromo artist take samples from his surroundings to build an earnest soundscape exploring the transience of even the most steadfast habits. “The closest thing to a home (the Ethiopian corner store) becomes a hole in the ground and your lover leaves you,” as Gheneti says. “Even routines and promises are ephemeral.”

figure eight – 1999 (cherry)

A mainstay of the Bay Area scene, figure eight originated as the experimental noise project of duo Nash Rood and Abby Goeser, starting out with nothing but a distorted synthesizer and acoustic drum kit. However, on welcoming a number of additional members in recent years (including Nicholas Coleman on bass and Nicky Esparza on drums), the band has now evolved into something altogether more full-bodied. Take new single ‘1999 (cherry)’, a song with finds the outfit at their most boisterous and reserved within the same three minutes. The searing opening is indebted to hardcore, though the crushing momentum soon breaks into something almost delicate. These twin threads of lightness and weight weave across the track into what appears to be the spirit of this new version of figure eight—a band aware of the transcendent power available at both ends of the spectrum.

His His – My Friend Wants to be a Freemason

We last featured Aidan Belo’s His His project almost exactly a year ago when we covered the single ‘Ford Econoline’, a song about life in a tour van that we said felt “like the sensation of returning home in your mind as you cruise down an unfamiliar stretch of highway in some faraway city.” The Toronto-based artist returns with a new EP, Good Gold, coming out next month, and has just released the final single ahead of the release. Informatively titled ‘My Friend Wants to be a Freemason’, it’s a track about a childhood friend who became obsessed with joining a masonic lodge. “The idea of joining this secret society consumed my friend, and for a couple of months it was all that he’d talk about,” as Belo describes. Musically the song follows a familiar His His formula, a gentle and folk-inflected indie pop song that wears an air of weary wistfulness like the grain in an old film photograph.

Good Gold is due to be released on 15th November via Victory Pool Records. You can pre-save it now on streaming services.

Kassie Krut – Reckless

Kassie Krut are wasting no time introducing themselves. “K / A / S / S / I / E / K / R / U / T / T / T / T,” goes the opening line of new single ‘Reckless’, a de facto theme song for the new project of Kasra Kurt, Eve Alpert (formerly of Palm) and Matt Anderegg (Mothers, Body Meat). The band have just signed to Fire Talk Records, and new single offers a glimpse at the core of the project. Something undoubtedly contemporary yet possessing a rawer dimension too, as though through the idiosyncratic art pop style comes an altogether more atavistic, primal energy. Directed by Guy Kozak, the video for the song was filmed at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, and offers a visual representation of the sound’s frantic playfulness.

‘Reckless’ is out now and available via the Kassie Krut Bandcamp page.

Mark Trecka – Witch’s Hat (ft. Midwife & An Heap)

The work of Mark Trecka never sits still, the Chicago-born artist and activist utilising sound to explore a diverse set of styles and themes in a practice as inventive as it is ambitious. More recent work has turned towards post-punk as an avenue of exploration, and latest single ‘Witch’s Hat’ continues to plough that same furrow. Recorded between Paris and Colorado, the track is described as Trecka’s “Halloween song,” existing with the common ground between that which is haunting and beautiful. Midwife joins on backing vocals and An Heap on synths to further elevate the dynamic, the song moving from apparent minimalism into a gauzy atmosphere as though pushing through the layers of time itself.

Michael Younker – Bad News

Michael Younker is a Detroit-born, Brooklyn-based production designer who also makes rock & roll music that he says “melds lighthearted cynicism with unashamed big rock motifs.” He has just released his debut EP, Sweet Things, a four-song record that’s brash and chaotic and amped up with bratty energy. “Sonically & lyrically, Sweet Things feels like the kid who ate too much sugar, bounced off walls, and passed out on the floor,” Younker describes. “Music of obsession, excess, indulgence, and…consequences?” ‘Bad News’ is perhaps the best place to start, capturing the EP’s manic motion and carefree bravado. “I can’t make you love me,” Younker sings, before snottily trying his best anyway in the following line – “C’mon, give it a go!”

Old Man of the Woods – Ghost

“A visceral exploration of a villain’s arc, tracing her devolution from possession to obsession to dissolution.” So reads the album notes for Triptych I: Devolve, the latest release from Seattle-based project Old Man of the Woods. The first in a series of EPs, the three-song collection offers a self-described “goth ethereal mycelial” sound to chart a fall from grace in all of its tragedy, majesty and strange avenues of agency. Such as with single ‘Ghost’, where the central character moves from resentment to something closer to power with the realisation that the ability to haunt can represent its own form of control.

Orchid Mantis – Dead Malls (feat. Cathedral Bells)

Following a collaboration with Sign Crushes Motorist earlier this year, not to mention several more singles in the meantime, Orchid Mantis (the recording project of Atlanta‘s Thomas Howard) has returned with a new single ‘Dead Malls’. This time featuring Orlando, Florida shoegazey bedroom pop act Cathedral Bells, the track uses imagery of an abandoned shopping mall to explore emotions altogether more personal. Where past hopes, once bright and shiny and full of promise, have withered on the vine, now little more than empty husks. But the atmosphere is not downbeat, rather wistful and hazy, looking back on old memories as though flickering warm and grainy from an old film projector.

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After the critical success of 2021’s An Overview on Phenomenal Nature—a collection of songs we described as “shaped by [a] careful but fleeting hand, like sculptures allowed to dissipate as soon as they have formed. Moments captured, meaning what they will”—Cassandra Jenkins is returning this summer with a brand new album, My Light, My Destroyer. Again released via Dead Oceans, the record promises to push Jenkins’s sound to new heights, building upon indie rock foundations with sophistipop, jazz and new age sensibilities. Latest single ‘Petco’ gives a hint at exactly what this sounds like, all tied together by a distinctive lyricism that’s as confessional, wry and ambitious as anything on An Overview.

My Light, My Destroyer is out on the 12 July via Dead Oceans and you can pre-order it now.

Closebye – Pilates

Hammer of My Own, the forthcoming full-length from New York‘s Closebye, embraces both the destructive and constructive connotations of its titular tool. The early 2020s saw the outfit on the verge of break-up, and the heavy cost of the pandemic on the music industry left them in need of a complete rebuild. The new album finds catharsis in razing what stood before, clearing the ground for a new version of Closebye to slowly rise. In doing so, it finds the band exploring pressing themes of work and self-reliance in a world which too often demands we pull ourselves up by our bootstraps. Single ‘Pilates’ sees Margaux join for an exploration of self-improvement and its attached baggage, discovering how change requires as much dismantling (be that of doubt, denial etc) as it does building.

Watch the video directed by Elizabeth Kroner below:

Hammer of My Own is out on the 23rd August and you can pre-order it now.

Dustin O’Halloran – Spiritus Naturae Aeternus

Having started out as a founding member of the dream pop outfit Dēvics while also working solo under his own name, composer and pianist Dustin O’Halloran found himself invited by Sofia Coppola to provide music for Marie Antoinette, triggering an adjacent career scoring films. If that wasn’t enough, he’d later go on to form A Winged Victory for the Sullen with Adam Wiltzie (Stars of the Lid), but has continued to release music under his own name too. Probing at the intersection of technology and human consciousness, latest album 1 0 0 1 originated as a collaboration with choreographer and dancer Fukiko Takase, and single ‘Spiritus Naturae Aeternus’ offers a small glimpse of the conceptual whole which results.  A “representation of the beauty and chaos of nature,” as O’Halloran describes, where piano, solo violin, orchestral strings and the female voice create a celebration of the natural world and a requiem for that we stand to lose. Watch the video directed by Markus Englmair and featuring Takase below:

1 0 0 1  is out now via Deutsche Grammophon.

Gabriel Birnbaum – A Feeling Unbroken

“Now that you’re on your way / how does it feel to remember / from thirty thousand feet / to those apartments where the air pressed down / down on your throat you’re waking choking in hell?” So asks Gabriel Birnbaum on ‘A Feeling Unbroken’, the latest single from his forthcoming album Patron Saint of Tireless Losers on Western Vinyl. It’s a line which captures the essence the record both tonally and stylistically. Birnbaum has become increasingly interested in music’s narrative potential, and Patron Saint finds him at his most confident to date. It presents vignettes which occupy the knife-edge between specificity and ambiguity, rewarding the return listener with layers of wry humour and naked human emotion. ‘A Feeling Unbroken’ might be one of the more sonically restrained songs, but its sense of downward pressure seems central to a record of characters desperate for a few inches of fresh air within the choking hell of their present.

god is a feeling unbroken
long may you run in the open
god is a feeling unbroken
long may you run in the open
I’ll be watching

Joseph Decosimo, Luke Richardson, Cleek Schrey –  Rockingham

Back in 2021, Joseph Decosimo, Luke Richardson and Cleek Schrey convened at a cabin in Tennessee to work on an album, Beehive Cathedral. Each of the musicians are storied stewards of the traditional folk style and the record provided an opportunity for them to share, exchange and elevate their collective repertoire to not only preserve Old-time American and Appalachian songs but fashion the next link in the long chain of musical history. The album will be released later this month via Dear Life Records, but for now latest single ‘Rockingham’ offers a prime example of the trio’s intentions. Keeping alive a rich cultural heritage while mining the old tunes for the full depth of their interpretive possibilities.

 Mark Trecka – Sense of Fiction

We’ve followed the work of Chicago-born, Paris-based writer, sound artist, performer and activist Mark Trecka since 2021’s Acknowledgement. It was what we described as “more akin to an intertextual artwork than a conventional album” which explored the connective tissue which links individuals in a society no matter how oppressed or invisible those people might be. Subsequent releases have built upon this compassionate style, be it Implication‘s continued exploration of community and connection or The Bloom of Performance which used an amalgamation of post-punk and art pop to push Trecka’s work further still. The first in a series of singles released with Beacon Sound, ‘Sense of Fiction’ sees the continuation of this style. What the artist describes as “a paean to self-mythologizing as an instrument for overcoming emotional darkness,” the song sits adjacent to the eerie beauty and strangeness established on the previous record, reaching towards an almost Bowie-esque confidence with a soundscape of dream pop bass, drum machine beats and Trecka’s signature avant garde experiments.

 Moonheart – people’s prayer (after​/​w/ Lucille Clifton)

Moonheart is the project of songwriter, composer and poet Kim Mayo, who has recently released a new single, ‘people’s prayer’. Inspired by and featuring a Lucille Clifton poem, Mayo says the song is “an ode, thank u letter, & prayer for all the freedom fighters, truth tellers, mess-makers, & courageous, principled hearts who have been planting such fertile seeds for the new world now blooming.” It’s calm and unhurried but with a gentle power, a burning belief in a better world free of violence and war and inequality. As May continues, the song is for “[Those] who have created portals to show us that new world where care reigns supreme, who have made stunning dents in the war machine & the ruling class’s pockets full of blood & shown us how, who have created beautiful noise & mess & chaos in the name of love, freedom & justice.”

Pure Hex – Web and Wick

San Francisco‘s Pure Hex—that’s Marta Alvarez (vocals), Zach Dighans (guitar) Hussain Khan (guitar), Luke Clingerman (bass) and Jon Annunziato (drums)—are taking an unorthodox approach to their new album, Spilling/Five of Tears. Though envisaged as a full-length record, the release is separated into two discrete sections (as suggested by the title), and the band decided to share it in two parts via Neon Bloodbath. Hence Spilling, the first six songs, is out now, while fans have to wait for the second half. Closing out this section, latest single ‘Web and Wick’ has the job of not only concluding a set of songs but opening up towards what might come next. It proves itself more than ready for the task, this mammoth, shoegaze-inflected slice of indie rock which blends dreamlike imagery with a visceral weight to leave the audience desperate for what comes next.

I had a dream that we parted
When I woke up it was fake
It isn’t safe to come home anymore
Maybe you’ll burn me like a witch at the stake

 Warik – Biscuits

Later this summer Chicago-based music and video artist Warik is releasing the follow-up to 2016 album Warik’s Tape, the appropriately titled Warik’s Tape 2. Landing somewhere between indie rock and pop, the previous album offered an ideal summer sound, full of enough hazy tones and playful energy to satisfy those pining for 00s buzz bands like Wavves and Abe Vigoda. The opening tracks of the new record find Warik continuing with the bright pop sensibilities but add a layer of sleek polish. Be it ‘Yellowish’ with its combination of languid rhythm and glitchy detail, or the soulful, loose-limbed confidence of ‘Biscuits’. The sound of an artist to watch for sure, not to mention an early addition to your summer playlists.

Warik’s Tape 2 will be released later this summer, so keep an eye on the Warik Bandcamp page.

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The resulting compositions moved between plaintive and chaotic, though eventually found meaning and joy in the sheer physicality of noise. As we concluded:

It’s a wordless reminder that although Mark Trecka is committed to exploring serious themes, his work is far from devoid of hope. Rather, Acknowledgement is a compassionate work of art which insists that we as a society share both our joys and our burdens.

This autumn sees Mark Trecka return with Implication, a brand new album again on Whited Sepulchre that has its roots in the same recording process as Acknowledgement. Aside from one exception, all the sounds on the record were sourced from single prepared piano improvisation performed during that very same session, with Trecka manipulating the result with various loops and effects to build a strikingly diverse palette.

The exception to the rule comes via ‘Radiance’, a track at the album’s heart which sees Trecka joined by Walt McClements and his processed accordion. With a glistening tone and patient movement, the sound lives up to its title, presenting an almost celestial air as McClements wrangles the loops into a kind of slow-moving order. But despite this otherworldly style, there’s a rawness too. An unprocessed experimentalism that grounds the track as the product of two humans interacting with, and responding to, one another.

True to the Mark Trecka oeuvre, the aims and intentions of Implication extend beyond the sound’s surface. The title track was first created for a performance broadcast on Bethlehem, Ramallah and Amman-based radio station, Radio alHara. Trecka had gathered writing from incarcerated people in New York State, and shared them during the performance via the station’s chat channel. This intertextual dimension again drew attention to those ignored or forgotten by society, and the impact far exceeds that of the songs alone. The intimate and imperfect collaboration of ‘Radiance’ comes to represent a truly human beauty, while the warmth of closer ‘Focus as Shelter’ cuts through the traditional barriers to carve out a safe and benevolent space. Implication is therefore both a statement and a sanctuary, a reprieve from the violent disregard of society and an indication of how communication and collaboration might work to dismantle its hold.

Implication is out now via Whited Sepulchre Records and available from the Mark Trecka Bandcamp page.

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Mark Trecka says Acknowledgment is a reflection on fifteen years of dialogue between the personal and the political, and is more akin to an intertextual artwork than a conventional album. Drawing on work from the likes of writer Yuri Herrara, Public Enemy and prison abolitionist and artist Jackie Wang, Trecka explores what he describes as the “fascia connecting us all, despite the designed invisibility of certain communities,” with particular reference to “stateless persons, incarcerated persons and houseless individuals.”

These connections come in many forms. Take ‘Wave Games’, with its restless piano and awkward, automated rhythms, which contemplates the role of rivers and oceans as both a nexus of links and as impassable barriers. This in turn reflects on juxtapositions between global supply chains of oil tankers and cargo ships and the plight of individuals forced to cross bodies of water in search of better living conditions. The record’s mid-point, ‘Guides’ also draws on themes of interconnection, a song Trecka says “pushes back against the chaotic cult of the self by seeking guides—those who have gained knowledge through experience—above the speculative brashness of ‘leaders’.”

The title track is the record’s only instrumental, a patient beginning of plaintive piano and aching negative space eventually giving way to a cacophony of sound and energy. It’s a moment of unabashed abandon that finds wild hope in the affirming physicality of noise. Or, as the press release puts it, the “joy in making very, very loud sounds over and over.” It’s a wordless reminder that although Mark Trecka is committed to exploring serious themes, his work is far from devoid of hope. Rather, Acknowledgement is a compassionate work of art which insists that we as a society share both our joys and our burdens.

Acknowledgement is out now and you can get it from Whited Sepulchre Records or the Mark Trecka Bandcamp page.

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