Anyone who loves electronic music, is looking for something experimental, or is nostalgic for vintage games should listen to The Computer Room.
Tran explores a wide variety of synth sounds throughout, forming intertwining layers of sound that venture from crashing walls to sparse dissonances, reveling in both the drama of reverb and haunted wisps of sound.
The picture Pinderhughes is painting on Grief is a sullen one, calling out the sufferings caused by racial capitalism; policing and prison systems; and oppressive ideologies.
Grief aims to evoke feeling through texture and harmony by underlining the human voice as a bonding agent.
The opening piano notes are barely sufficient warning to brace for the sweet and powerful voices that transport us to Samora Pinderhughes' Tiny Desk (home) concert, shot on film.
Pinderhughes' album, Grief, is at the core of the project. The song "Holding Cell," which vividly explores the two questions, imagines letters written by three inmates.
It's fascinating listening to this record from Samora Pinderhughes, like how much softness there is to it at the same time. There's real grandeur and range and reach. Grief is a fantastic record.
Pinderhughes has become a virtuoso at turning the experience of living in community inside-out, revealing all its personal detail and tension, and giving voice to registers of pain that are commonly shared but not often articulated.
At the end of the first movement, a mournful lullaby gives way to brutal sounds and scenes from the genocide.
In making music that ventures out from its center and back again, Vandever explores how healing can be like a maturing tree. The roots remain—it’s the branches that move in new directions.
The trombonist Kalia Vandever lands on New Amsterdam for an album of patient discovery.
Soft is the composition that opens the new album, with a melody whose offbeat syncopation… combines poplike concision with a whisper of classical minimalism.
Regrowth is a confident stride forwards… released as spring is in full swing, Regrowth is a tribute to creation and persistence: both in nature and artistically.
Regrowth as a whole is unsuspecting – it is as much a mystery as it is a synchronized stream of consciousness, emotion, and perspective. It is what emerges when stagnation feels imminent and creativity is daunting.
Regrowth’s pieces tend to be recursive and insistent, worrying over small cycles of material in ways that suggest equally the minimalism of Steve Reich and the transcendent meditations of Pharoah Sanders.
An impressive sophomore LP, Regrowth displays creative development on all fronts. As good as it is, it also presages more evolution to come, indicating a masterpiece sits in Vandever’s near future.
Kalia Vandever sculpts her trombone’s golden tones into dazzling compositions. Starting with the gentle liftoff of opener “Soft,” the record unfurls like petals in early spring.
Metamorphosis of Narcissus performed with exacting finesse by Metropolis is a kaleidoscope of uncertain, dark terrain rendered effervescent thanks to shimmery percussion and haunting mini-soliloquies in the bassoon and clarinet.
An evocatively scored tone poem, “Metamorphosis of Narcissus” is crammed full of vividly orchestrated, lively motives… Metropolis provides a detailed rendering of the piece.
All of the works here are impressive, but Metamorphosis of Narcissus was my favorite — it manages to be dense and ethereal at the same time… and alternates moments of intense emotionalism with sweetly but eerily lyrical passages.