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Kara-Lis Coverdale, “From Where You Came” (Smalltown Supersound, 2025)

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I was beginning to despair that I may never hear a new Kara-Lis Coverdale album ever again, as it has been eight years since the Montreal-based composer last surfaced with the stellar Grafts EP (the strongest release of her career). This latest release is definitely not what I was expecting as a follow up, however, as it often resembles an ‘80s New Age synth visionary attempting to perform a hypnagogic live soundtrack to a classic Disney fairytale, but a mischievous projectionist spliced in some surprise scenes from a vampire film, a kooky carnival, and a tropical vacation to keep her on her toes.

The fairytale that I envision is quite a unique one though, as the plot that I imagine is that a cool princess in a magic crystal castle emerges every evening to give an eclectic freeform Mellotron concert to an enraptured audience of unicorns and delightful woodland creatures who love every single allusion to 20th century jazz and avant-garde composers or 19th century programmatic music.  Nothing bad or frightening ever happens (aside from the occasional dissonant harmony or viscerally slicing texture) and everyone lives happily ever after.

That is admittedly not stylistic terrain that I ever expected to embrace, but these pieces are so charmingly playful, unpredictably experimental, and full of wonder that I quickly fell in love with this album in spite of myself. Even the darker moments have their share of endearingly wonky bits, as the lurching, gasping, and scraping industrial groove of album highlight “Offload Flip” erupts into a deliriously squirming and jazzy synth solo around the halfway point. 

Elsewhere, the Fourth World-inspired “Daze” suggests something between a Tim Hecker residency in the lounge of an exclusive tropical resort and something you’d hear playing in a New Age bookstore after dark when they bring out the wild stuff (like a secret tape of ayahuasca-fueled Laurie Spiegel improvisations or something). As for the remaining pieces, the evoke everything from a Siren’s fogbank serenade to a newly cured vampire greeting his first sunrise to a dueling synth showdown at a Renn Faire to a slowly deflating brass band being gradually engulfed by a swell of blissed-out synths. In short, this is a memorably fun, inventive, and freewheeling album. It may not much resemble the Kara-Lis Coverdale that I thought I knew, but the current Kara-Lis Coverdale has one hell of a wild and oft-revelatory vision.

Listen here.

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Ash Fure, “Animal” (Smalltown Supersound, 2025)

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This is arguably the solo debut from iconoclastic NYC composer Ash Fure, but it has been preceded by quite an impressive & eclectic run of ambitious performances and major accolades (an experimental opera, a Berghain performance, a Guggenheim Fellowship, etc.). Musically, Animal’s closest reference points are the building-shaking frequency sorcery of emptyset, the more abstract/deconstructed side of Pan Sonic/Mika Vainio, or one of Francisco López’s immersive sound installations. Conceptually and artistically, however, Fure is in a category all her own, as Animal was devised as a sort of performance/installation hybrid in which she plays an upturned subwoofer rig of 12 inch speaker cones with a large reflective sheet of polycarbonate. That sheet acts as a “real-time filter” for sound and light” and its “translucent material allows her to interact with lights built into the instrumental rig, and beam reflected sound and light around the exact architecture she’s in” (fittingly, Fure’s partner/collaborator Xavi Aguirre is an actual architect).

While that admittedly sounds very technological/futuristic, the album’s title is both intended as a bit of a swipe at artificial intelligence and as a literal reference to the sweat-drenched physicality of Fure’s performances and her desire to unleash sounds that “cause a bodily reaction” in her audience. Notably, the visceral nature of this work is inspired by Fure’s time haunting Detroit and Berlin techno clubs, but the resemblance to techno is otherwise limited to the constrained sound palette of “sub-bass, sonar clicks and white noise” that she seamlessly transforms into a series of pulsing psychoacoustic mirages. In more concrete terms, Animal is a shapeshifting fantasia of noise, drones, seismic bass, and percussion patterns that continually form new constellations as the various elements wax, wane, spatially pan, or fade in and out of focus. Sometimes the sounds can be meditative (slow-motion bass throbs) or eerily beautiful (glassy, feedback-like sounds), but the most stunning passages tend to be the crescendos that evoke everything from circling helicopters in a hallucinatory jungle warzone to a cloud of whirling knives to heaving industrial machinery slowly sinking in a bubbling tar pit with a laser light show accompaniment. In short, brilliant stuff all around. Hopefully I will someday manage to catch one of Fure’s actual performances, but Animal makes a great consolation prize in the meantime as both boldly visceral/unique sound art and one hell of a headphone album. 

Listen here.

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Carmen Villain, “Only Love From Now On” (Smalltown Supersound, 2022)

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This latest release from “US-born, Norwegian-Mexican artist and producer” Carmen Hillestad finds her back on her usual label (Smalltown Supersound), but it otherwise feels like the logical successor to last year’s oft-excellent Perlita. That is great news for me, I had been hoping that Perlita would not be a one-off departure for this shapeshifting project. That said, this project had already begun moving away from rock with the “cosmic excursions and dubby ambient-jams” of 2019’s Both Lines Will Be Blue, so maybe Hillestad is stylistically here to stay for a while (I hope so, at least). 

She is nevertheless still a creatively restless artist, however, as this album reveals yet another significant evolution for Carmen Villain’s arty, instrumental side: Only Love From Now On feels quite a bit more “Fourth World” indebted than previous releases and that transformation suits the project beautifully. Notably, flautist Johanna Scheie Orellana makes a welcome return after being featured on Perlita‘s brilliant “Agua Azul” and trumpeter Arve Henriksen now joins the party as well (for one song, anyway). Those more collaborative pieces tend to be the strongest ones, as the presence of a melodic hook almost always deepens the impression left by Carmen Villain’s already-wonderful ambient/dub/exotica concoctions.

According to Hillestad, this album is “fueled by the sense of scale in feeling small in the face of things so large” and the “contemplation of how the biggest impact we can have is in the people close to us.” Both are certainly themes that resonate with many these days, but they manifest themselves in fairly abstract ways here, as my main impression is that Only Love From Now On feels intimate and inward-looking, resembling a hypnagogic strain of exotica intended for the tropical grotto of the mind. Sometimes, anyway. Other times, it calls to mind a kosmiche twist on Terry Riley-style minimalism (“Silueta”) or a dubby, hiss-soaked collision of loscil and Huerco S. (lead single “Subtle Bodies,” which was coincidentally remixed by the latter for the B-side). 

Unsurprisingly, that single is one of the album strongest songs even if it might err on the side of being slightly too understated (the squelchy beat, water sounds, and breeze-like washes of hiss call to mind a killer rave at a frog pond whose denizens are very concerned about not bothering their neighbors). As delightful as that sounds, there are some other cool touches as well (dubby percussion effects, an actual bass line, buried vocals, etc.).

The album’s other top-tier highlight is the closing “Portals,” which elegantly combines a hollow and haunting melodic loop with watery exotica touches and bleary melodies that enigmatically drift in and out like ghosts. I quite like the four remaining pieces as well though (even when they delve into stylistic terrain I usually avoid). The title piece is the biggest would-be offender in that regard, as it resembles a smoky, neon-lit jazz-style flute solo in a billowing ambient dreamscape, but the backdrop is nicely frayed and hissing and I dig the stammering chords that emerge near the end. Elsewhere, the opening Henriksen collaboration sounds like a lost ’80s classic of Fourth World-inspired desert psychedelia. A persuasive person could have easily convinced me that it was from an imaginary Jon Hassell album and I would probably would have driven myself mad trying to track down that non-existent opus afterward, which I consider a fine compliment (I half expected to see Holger Czukay or Jah Wobble turn up in the credits).

Hillestad goes it alone for “Future Memory” (tropical Twin Peaks spin-off meets kosmische synth act) and “Liminal Space” (stammering, deconstructed house music over a panning, uneven rhythm of clacking pool ball-like sounds) with similarly fine results. In fact, there is not a single uninspired piece to be found on this album: just varying degrees of understatedness. There are probably a few small things that could have been changed to give this album more immediate and broad appeal, however, as this album occupies a blurry nexus where songcraft, dub techno, and psych-damaged moonlit palm tree ambiance overlap precariously. 

Fortunately, none of the inherent compromises involved in realizing such a vision bother me at all, as I love said vision and Hillestad’s nuanced execution is extremely impressive. There are definitely a handful of pieces that will immediately connect with more casual listeners (the songs with more pronounced melodies or grooves, unsurprisingly), but this is one of those albums that seems to get better and better the deeper I listen to it.

Samples can be found here.

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Bendik Giske, “Cracks” (Smalltown Supersound, 2021)

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I have been quite keen to hear just about everything that this Norwegian saxophonist releases since he damn near stole the show on Caterina Barbieri’s Fantas Variations earlier this year. Thus far, I have yet to be disappointed and this latest solo release beautifully continues Giske’s ascendance as one of the most compelling saxophonists on earth. When I first heard Cracks, it reminded me of Pauline Oliveros’s hugely influential Deep Listening, as much of it feels like a killer sax solo reverberating around a vast subterranean space leaving dreamlike ghost trails in its wake. 

As it turns out, that is a masterful illusion, as Giske got to the same place in a very different way (and with very different conceptual inspirations). One of those inspirations was José Esteban Muñoz’s Cruising Utopia, which suggests that “queerness must strive towards futurity.” A healthy portion of Cracks‘ futurity was provided by producer/collaborator André Bratten, as the album was recorded in “the new ‘resonant’ space of Bratten’s reactive studio tuned to his original sounds.” The album’s description further notes that Cracks brings Giske “one step closer to the man-machine,” but the beauty of the album for me lies in how effectively he combines intimate intensity with hypnotically repeating patterns.

The opening “Flutter” is aptly named, as it begins with a breathy, fluttering pattern hovering at the edge of audibility. Gradually, a warbling and tender melody takes shape and the piece blossoms into something wonderfully broken and beautiful. “Flutter” is one of the most simmering and understated pieces on the album, as the central pattern feels like little more than breath and flapping keys, but most of the remaining pieces share a very similar structure. 

“Cruising” soon solidifies what that structure is: Giske unleashes winding, serpentine arpeggios akin to Phillip Glass-style minimalism, but with a twist: those arpeggios almost always spiral outward into something strangled, howling, or tenderly poignant (and sometimes all within the same piece). Bratten’s hand plays a crucial role on “Cruising” as well, as the visceral intensity and gnarled textures that Giske wrests from his sax cut through a hallucinatory fog of long, lingering decays. It is quite an effective balance of sharp and soft textures, as the snarling central melodies stand out in stark relief while a deepening spell of unreality slowly intensifies in the background. 

The title piece is the sole divergence from that aesthetic, as the ghostly fog takes over completely for a long interlude of murky, billowing ambiance. The strongest piece on the album is “Void,” which follows the expected arc of repeating arpeggios splintering into howls of anguish, but represents that arc in its most perfect form. Or maybe I just like the central melody more than usual. In either case, “Void” hits quite an effective balance of animal intensity, poignance, and flickering psychedelia. 

The closing “Matter (part 3)” is yet another strong variation on the album’s “unraveling patterns” aesthetic, but it packs more of a throbbing, seething tension than the rest of the album. While I have not yet fully warmed to the title piece, Cracks is otherwise nothing but wall-to-wall greatness. I love the seemingly raw, intimate simplicity of these pieces, as Giske is an absolute genius at transforming a few arpeggios into something howling, unpredictable, and vibrantly alive.

Samples can be found here.