Mostly good music that I’ve been spinning recently
Stijn Hüwels and Tomoyoshi Date, hochu-ekki-tou
Stijn Hüwels and Norihito Suda, 山水 / Sansui
Hasco Duo, The Same Old Wonder
Ray Suhey/Lewis Porter Quartet, Transcendent
Martial Solal and Dave Liebman, Masters in Paris
Noctilucant, Crumbling Cities Echoing Their Terror
“He gets it! He knows music!”
“A reputable music blog.”
Through Winter-Early Spring 2020, these are the recordings that I liked the most. All but a couple new or recent. Find them at the links.
Note that this playlist only has stuff available at Spotify, natch.
“…Edgy models include Brooklyn Rail…”
“I strongly disagree with much of…this essay…but it’s incredibly well-written and thought-provoking, and definitely worth a read. This is the kind of writing that I would hold up as a perfect example of why blogs are not merely fun and interesting, but also serious and important.”
Steve Roach’s entire career of music making has revolved around two general poles: generative music and pattern-based music. The former coalesces through time out of tendrils of sound, like the way gravity draws gas together in space until the resultant mass ignites into a star, while the latter is music that comes out of sequencers, building and layering patterns into textures that transform as they amble along. The great example of his generative music is the classic Structures from Silence, while my favorite of his pattern music albums is Skeleton Keys, a great album.
Two 2019 releases from Roach mix these ideas. Bloom Ascension is sequenced throughout, while Trance Archeology takes an arch shape that gradually generates itself into patterns that eventually drift away. Of these two, I find Bloom Ascension the most satisfying, every moment is one that leads me to the next, and the result is the kind of cleansing experience that Roach strives for. There are moments of this as well in Trance Archeology, but there is also a gap between the quality of the generative washes of sound, which are standard but not exceptional, and the patterns that start to build once the album reaches its title track.
Roach is prolific (making music is as much a daily personal practice for him as it is the idea of creating something to present to others, you can read more about his thoughts in this interview I did with him for Bandcamp)—and at least to my listening his pattern-based explorations have been the most consistently successful over the last five years. He’s just set up his own Bandcamp page where you can subscribe to his output, and that’s sure to deliver a lot of music.
“George Grella, always on the money!”
“George Grella understood exactly.”
The Big City 
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