★American Dreams
Patience
“I keep thinking about this idea that once you think you’re on the path, you’ve lost the path,” says New York musician Devin Shaffer, explaining the ethos behind Patience, her first studio album. “There is no certainty, there is no knowing. It’s all about surrender.” Written between 2021 and 2023 and Shaffer’s move from Chicago to New York City, Patience mirrors life’s highs and lows on the search for spiritual meaning, purpose, and connection. For the first time, Shaffer leads a group of sensit…
Trinity
Trinity, the third collaborative album between Lawrence English and Stephen Vitiello, continues the pair’s patient, pliable musical explorations while marrying them with a unique collaborator—one per track—to map new territories. Trinity presents five collaborations with acclaimed artists who work at the edges of sound and genre: Chris Abrahams (The Necks), improvising turntablist Marina Rosenfeld, Brendan Canty (Fugazi, The Messthetics), multidisciplinary artist Aki Onda, and the late contempor…
Forgetting is Violent
Forgetting is Violent, Patrick Shiroishi’s latest solo LP, is his most immediate release yet, expanding the scope not just of his music but of his extramusical considerations. Where his past releases on American Dreams reckoned with racism against Japanese Americans or presented Shiroishi’s saxophone as heard in a parking garage, Forgetting is Violent considers racism as a whole, historical and ongoing, with the urgency it deserves. Here, for the first time, we hear Shiroishi joined by a support…
Eremos
Eremos is a Greek adjective meaning uninhabited, desert, or remote, but “the important thing for me is 'uninhabited',” says Iranian sound artist Siavash Amini, explaining the title of his new LP. For over a decade, Amini has crafted tight, detailed sound pieces drawing from electronic music, electroacoustic experimentation, and classical music traditions, working in solo and group configurations – see collaborations with Iranian duo 9T Antiope, American scholar and poet Eugene Thacker, French am…
Chthonic
Big Tip!. Red Vinyl Edition "Chthonic is the result of long-distance collaboration and mutual considerations. Lea Bertucci and Lawrence English met in 2019 at the Novas Frequencia festival in Rio de Janeiro and quickly became friends and collaborators, driven by musings on geological scale, movements – tectonic or otherwise – of the Earth, and subterranean density and pressure.
For people on visa in the United States during lockdown, it was impossible to leave and re-enter the country without p…
I was too young to hear silence
A single saxophone, a glockenspiel, two microphones, a zoom recorder. These are the materials Patrick Shiroishi brought down with him late one night into the cavernous parking structure below a hot pot restaurant in Monterey Park. It was around 1:30AM; the spot was not too far from where Shiroishi grew up, a blank slate shown to him by his dear friend, Noah Klein. A vacant space for a new kind of collaboration—between saxophone and silence, between noise and reverberation, between negative space…
A Heavenly Touch
Claire Rousay's new album "A heavenly touch" fuses piano, percussion and recordings on the field in a silent and transgressive mix. Originally released on cassette in April 2020 by Already Dead Tapes, this marks its first appearance on vinyl, mastered by Andrew Weathers. Fundamental to understanding the evolution of Claire Rousay as an artist.