‘With Touch, the Tortoise bandmembers — Jeff Parker, Dan Bitney, Douglas McCombs, John Herndon, and John McEntire — harness their collectivist songwriting approach, a slightly anarchistic but resolutely egalitarian process where ideas triumph over ego towards an abstracted muscularity. While there are still excursions into the dusky, elegantly gnarled jazz ambience that flourished on landmark works like Millions Now Living Will Never Die and TNT, Touch is perhaps most remarkable for Tortoise’s unapologetic embrace of grand gesture. Aerodynamically re-engineered Krautrock, hand-cranked techno rave-ups, and pointillist spaghetti western fanfares are all imbued with Tortoise’s now-signature internal logic — equally alluring and confounding, a puzzle to be savored rather than solved.’

Intensely evocative, meditative duets by modular synthesizer and viola, interwoven with field recordings — birds, the sound of forests — encapsulating sojourns on the Åland archipelago in the Baltic Sea, between Sweden and Finland.

‘Quietly multi-rhythmic, modular-trance-meets-processed-and-unprocessed-chamber strings, bewitching and bewildering field recordings all knitted tightly, an LA patchwork.’

“Our studios are side-by-side. When we were writing this album, you might have found us tracking viola stacks in one studio while, in the other, we were writing through-composed themes and rearranging the material. Granular synthesis and tape manipulation are key tools we use to create variation and movement in a composition. This process often yields surprising results, capturing the emotion but expressing it in unexpected ways. It feels essential that we embrace a bit of chance.
“In contrast to our first album, Recordings from the Aland Islands, we wanted this music to feel very present. Where Recordings was intended to transport you to another place, Different Rooms is meant to meet you where you are. It’s a decidedly urban album. The field recordings were captured on rain platforms, in city streets, in rooms at home, and intentionally paint a quotidian sonic image, blurring the line between what you hear in your own environment and what is on the record.”

Featuring Jeff Parker.

Flexidisc.

‘Minimalism is usually cool, detached, frictionless and mathematical. The music made by percussionist Bex Burch is not any of these things. What she calls ‘messy minimalism’ shares some characteristics with the music of Steve Reich and John Adams, but this is minimalism that isn’t afraid to break into a sweat and get its hands dirty (quite literally, given that Burch actually builds her own instruments from scratch). She mainly plays a gyil, a marimba-like tuned percussion instrument she learned while studying music in Ghana.
‘Burch’s first solo album lands her in Chicago, enlisting trumpeter Ben LaMar Gay and members of Tortoise. Sometimes, the results sound like an earthier Philip Glass: Dawn Blessings pairs her dreamlike, two-note gyil pattern with violinist Macie Stewart’s beautiful harmonies; Don’t Go Back to Sleep sees Burch’s gyil fractionally out of phase with a synthesiser, then spins into hypnotic but disorientating minimal techno.
‘Other tracks get wilder. There are drum circles, water drums and birdsong; tracks that exploit the acoustics of a California canyon. Pardieu turns a three-note xylophone riff into a compelling funk groove; Fruit Smoothie With Peanut Butter is a wonderfully chaotic drum circle that sounds melodic despite not featuring any tuned instruments. Best of all is You Thought You Were Free?, which layers clattering percussion over the wailing siren of a tornado warning relayed over Chicago until it sounds like a freakish fusion of the Master Musicians of Joujouka and Fela Kuti’ (The Guardian).

‘Dedicated to Jaimie Branch, this features a compacted version of Mazurek’s long-running Exploding Star Orchestra, including guitarist Jeff Parker, vocalist Damon Locks, drummer Gerald Cleaver, and pianists Angelica Sanchez and Craig Taborn.
‘Drop the needle and immediately find this crew deep in a chromatic funk fantasy of outer-space grooves and Bartokian riffs. MC Damon Locks brings the Deltron 3030 energy while pianist Craig Taborn and Angelica Sanchez face-off from behind Wurlitzer pianos and Moog synthesizers. Parker is in absolute space shred mode.’

Nineteen, hip-hoppin, be-boppin capsules of funk, conjured and distilled from a year’s worth of weekly shows by the drummer, in a reclaimed bank vault in the heart of Chicago’s Ukrainian Village.
Jazz improvisation — but compact, to-the-point and organic as a mosquiter’s tweeter — dipped in krautrock, d&b, house and B-boy science. Featuring the brilliant vibes playing of Justefan, and local luminaries like Jeff Parker from Tortoise and De’Sean Jones from Underground Resistance.
Warmly recommended.