* Edition of 100 copies * Two years of sessions went into this record, spread between 2023 and 2025 at Marmalade, the West Loop studio Ishmael Ali co-founded and works in as an engineer. Nobody was watching the clock. You can hear that in the shape of the thing: ten pieces that were never meant to add up to a single argument, solo cello miniatures wedged between full band tracks, a couple of them actual songs with words and a singer. The solo pieces may be the strangest part of it. Ali amplifies the cello and then works against it in ways that have nothing to do with repertoire, repeating a bowed arpeggio until the tone begins to shred and come apart, or holding two adjacent strings far enough out of unison that the beating between them becomes the whole event. They run two or three minutes each and interrupt the record at intervals, like someone changing the subject at a table where the conversation had got comfortable.

Around them a band assembles and dissolves. Ed Wilkerson Jr., longtime AACM member and leader of 8 Bold Souls, plays tenor saxophone and alto clarinet; Corey Wilkes, of the Art Ensemble of Chicago, is on trumpet; Jim Baker handles piano and ARP, Bill Harris drums and percussion, Brianna Tong voice. Some of what they do is written and some of it isn't, and the record is not especially interested in helping you tell which is which. Drum machine samples fall apart and Harris walks in through the gap. Wilkerson takes a solo over what could pass, in poor light, for an early-80s new wave song. On Everness the recorded voice of Jorge Luis Borges arrives over pizzicato and gurgling electronics while the piano keeps implying changes that never resolve into a standard. The title came from a friend, looking at a heap of faulty XLR cables on the studio floor: burn the plastic, sell the copper. Ali had been trying to finish a solo album for years and kept accumulating music that belonged to different worlds. The phrase gave him a way through it. It also carries the obvious sour joke about what gets done to things once they stop being useful, and Ali is not above enjoying that.

Memory, and its coming apart, is the recurring subject here. Amalgam invoke Arthur Russell in their own notes, which is fair enough if you take it as a matter of permission rather than sound - cello, voice, a dance pulse, no obligation to pick a category. Writing in The Quietus, Andreo Michaelo Mielczarek described the album as "a mess - but a poetic, intelligent, and beautiful one." After a decade of turning up on other people's records, in Je'raf and Hearsay and Kahil El'Zabar's Ethnic Heritage Ensemble, Ali has made one that only he could have assembled, and he has done it without asking anyone to leave the room.