RECENT LISTENING #46

A Magic Whistle, Wednesday Knudsen, Oren Ambarchi/Johan Berthling/Andreas Wiirlen, Balance, Coffin Prick, Unchained

A MAGIC WHISTLE The Solar Cell LP (LAMPSPEOPLE UNIVERSAL/PUBLIC EYESORE) In which someone I hadn’t heard of before named Andy Puls drops the synth/folk LP of the year 2025 A.D. There was a time when a record like this might have been called by the cringe-term folktronica, but even for music so clearly built from the folktronica two-step cocktail of solo electronics + solo guitar, and recorded in “a small hut in the Cascade Mountains of northernmost California” no less, that rightfully disparaged term is fully inadequate here. The record is called The Solar Cell, the name Puls records under is A Magic Whistle, and the highly musical compositions and miniatures within (there are 21 tracks and 14 are less than two minutes long) are too bold to rest passively within any cheekily-named subgenre in which synths merely add genteel electro-burble to guitar-based folk music. The synths here take the lead with mini-symphonic chord changes and melodies, always played with a non-bucolic nerded-out and even slightly aggro edge, augmented further by superb guitar overdubs that bring out the more earthy and human harmonic possibilities from the less forgiving electronics. In addition to “acoustic and electric guitars,” there is an instrument built by Puls called the “Cascadian sympathetic steel guitar” . . . he also credits “home-made sequencers and synthesizers” . . . and would you believe Puls also built the aforementioned small hut where all of this instrument-building and album-recording takes place, pictured abstractly on the front cover, photographically on the back, and called, like the album itself, the Solar Cell? “My studio workshop hut is just a tiny little space, 8ftx12ft, on our property, which is off-grid itself. When you are in the Cell, you can’t help but experience the natural world around you. It is like a little space capsule, with a big circular window facing out into the canyon,” says Puls in an interview/article by Brad Rose on Foxy Digitalis where you can read more about all of this and see more photos. But most importantly, please get this album and listen to it. Don’t worry, I’ll remind you again in two weeks when the Blastitude Best of 2025 issue hits your inbox . . .

WEDNESDAY KNUDSEN Atrium 2LP (FEEDING TUBE/SPINSTER) In which Wednesday Knudsen makes a double LP of true 21st Century ECM-core. Seriously though, I can’t help but think of the ECM label when listening to Atrium and its hauntingly austere and exploratory reeds/flute/more multitracking, both improvisational and compositional, but this is a very deep record in other ways and deserves more than a cheekily named subgenre tag (I did that in the previous Magic Whistle review too — bad habit). For example, the reeds playing that kicks off the album with “Fair Aegis” comes more from minimalism than ECM, from a post-Arkbro or even Niblockian space, and the choral wordless vocals I suddenly think I’m hearing in track five “Conversation, Chaconne” are in fact so wordless and blended with the other instrumentation that I start to wonder if there have been vocals throughout the first four tracks as well, and that I just haven’t evolved into hearing them yet. Those are the kind of depths we’re working with here . . .

OREN AMBARCHI/JOHAN BERTHLING/ANDREAS WERLIIN Ghosted LP (DRAG CITY); Ghosted II LP (DRAG CITY); Ghosted III LP (DRAG CITY) This month’s winner of the “Album that Popped Up on the Shitify Algoshitm That Was So Good I Immediately Went and Purchased a Copy at My Local Record Store Instead of Listening to it on Shitify” award goes to Ghosted on Drag City, a rarefied improvisational groove setting played by a normal-appearing trio of guitar (Oren Ambarchi), acoustic bass (Johan Berthling), and acoustic drums (Andreas Werliin), slowly and patiently unspooling and simmering in an ambient (mostly) acoustic world/jazz style. Ambarchi’s electric guitar takes the form of abstract ambient electronics (I didn’t recognize it as a guitar for at least 5 or 6 listens and only after finally reading the credits) in a sort of subdued-(Keith)Rowe tabletop style, like soft light flickering, or the use of light color by painters. Props also to Werliin on the trap kit, keeping the groove rooted and locked but also bringing constant subtle extrapolation and syncopation, plenty of “that sound in between.” And finally, props to the eerie (yet basketball-themed) street photography on the cover. But wait! This record review ain’t over yet: the Ambarchi/Berthling/Werliin trio has actually made two more of these records now with the addition of Ghosted II from 2024 and Ghosted III from 2025, both also on Drag City, and it’s so welcome to hear their patience and focus as they stay in the exact same acoustic/ambient/groove lane, the way Berthling locks into bass ostinatos and holds on tight, which lets Werliin do that aforementioned extrapolasynco thing (a portmanteau I just coined, though it admittedly may not catch on), the two of them implying soil which implies sunshine which allows Ambarchi’s gently unfolding guitaristics to grow and every now and then flower into unforeseen ripples. Every time it happens, it feels like suddenly briefly understanding entire phrases in a new language. POSTSCRIPT: Just before presstime, I’ve learned that Berthling and Werliin are the rhythm section for saxophonist Mats Gustafsson’s group Fire!, who have made many full-length records themselves over the last two decades, including one from 2012 called In the Mouth — a Hand that includes Oren Ambarchi in the group as co-producer and guitarist, a full ten years before these sans-Gustafsson Ghosted sessions started happening, the rabbithole becoming a veritable warren. Believe me, I’m going down and in — but not in this record review.

BALANCE Live at the Congregation (NO LABEL) This is the second BlastLetter in a row where I’m mentioning the Detroit jazz duo Balance and an article about them by Ana Gavrilovska that was published in Maggot Brain #16. What I didn’t say about Gavrilovska’s article last issue is that within she describes attending a live performance by Balance at “the Congregation, a restaurant-venue that has maintained the original architecture of the former church it now occupies, including those blessed ceilings and a 150-year-old organ. For this show, the duo decided to bring along their electronics on a whim.” “The additions that night were fairly minimal, mainly consisting of a synthesizer with a sequencer and delay/looper pedals…” “…they recorded that set at the Congregation, and it turned out so well that they plan to do a digital release.” This is that release, recorded in December 2023 and released as a digital album in April 2024, indeed a new development in the duo’s sound, as their first two albums were strictly acoustic and real-time; on Live at the Congregation the duo of Michael Malis and Marcus Elliot still play their usual respective piano and saxophone, but the addition of the aforementioned electronics and time-distorting overdub-approximating loops is a whole other level, especially when the performance remains fully improvised. Hard not to think of what Jeff Parker and Josh Johnson are doing with loops and delays in the ETA IVtet and the influence thereof, but Live at the Congregation still fully sounds like Balance, still hanging out in deep jazz/gospel zones as on “Chorale” or “Single Petal of Rose” (the latter by Duke Ellington, the only non-improvised piece on here), but also getting into wild modular synth that could have grown in Alvin Curran’s Giardino Magnetico as on “When We Come Home” and “To the Source.”

COFFIN PRICK “Side Splits” LP (SOPHOMORE LOUNGE) Crazy new(-ish) record I forgot I had in the stacks alert: a compilation of Coffin Prick remixes by no less a weird wrecking crew than (in sequential order) YoshimiO (crazy tribal tom-tom drumming as would befit the drummer from The Boredoms), Ian Williams/Battles (very deconstructed weird rhythm track but the original chord changes from the song “Laughing” do fight their way through), Ed Sunspot (the bass line and some vocal snatches from the original synth-pop dirge “Rusty Lemonade” remain and a lounge/exotica bongo/theremin trip is built around them), John Herndon, Melt Banana, Gel Set, Tim Kinsella, Dan Bitney (the two remixes contributed by Tortoise members Herndon and Bitney are really good, Bitney’s take on “Swimming” transforming the original into something more like funky dungeon synth, with the use of a nasty vocoder on the vocals that really brings this whole Mecht Mensch/Mechanical Man thing full circle), Shit and Shine, Dream_Mega, Beau Wanzer, and Roadhouse (Roadhouse being Ryan Davis solo, the “small, mobile, intelligent unit” version of the Roadhouse Band).

UNCHAINED Frontalier (STERN RECORDS) Damn, Nate Davis aka Unchained really did tap into his inner Marcus Miller with this one, just like I suggested he do in my “ECM-Core Watch (2025)” piece from three months ago. But hey, Frontalier was surely in the can before that piece was published, and I was of course 90% joking, though 10% of any joke is that hard kernel of truth within, and the hard truths here are that I do love the ECM label, think Marcus Miller is a bad-ass, and I’m digging what’s happening here on the new Unchained album Frontalier, even (especially?) if it’s a little smoother and slicker than the previous Unchained album Gabbeh. In fact, Frontalier might mark the full-circle moment where we’ve gone from underground heads scorning smooth jazz in the ‘90s, to liking/playing it ironically in the ‘00s and 10’s, to liking/playing it with zero irony as on Frontalier in 2025. The definition of the French word frontalier is “habitant d’une région frontière,” or “inhabitant of a border region,” and the border region here is where jazz, post-punk, experimental, smooth, slick, cheesy, raw, and home-recorded all hang out together. Dig how the tracks are built over simple drum machine patterns (on side one at least) for that lo-tech home-recorded vibe, use traditional supper-club jazz-guitar chord changes and solo licks for that no-longer-ironic smooth/slick/cheese vibe, and then how those changes and licks inevitably start splitting off from each other like small tree-branch systems through the magic of multitracking for that experimental/improvisational/fractal vibe. A layered experience, one might say.