Words by Sean Victory
Sean Victory is a lifelong artist, tinkerer, and musician. His current projects are Nightmare Frontier and World Hum, having also contributed to the groups Famished Ghosts, Future Toys, and Owl & Swan.
Pareidolia by Jim O’Rourke & Eiko Ishibashi (Drag City)
I’ve long been a huge fan of Jim O’Rourke. His work ethic is as impressive as the many hats he can wear. Whether he’s working behind the mixing desk—like on Wilco’s Yankee Hotel Foxtrot, filling out the line up with Sonic Youth, wandering through his own landscape of infinitely digressive, meticulously crafted pop songs (see Eureka and Insignificance), or just stretching his legs in the Steamroom—all these aforementioned contributions hardly scratch the surface, so prolific, this O’Rouke—each era of his handiwork has an audible patience and a recognizable aesthetic.
He left his birthplace of Chicago 20 years ago, so that he could become a permanent resident of Japan. Since this departure, his creations have become increasingly abstract. In fact, the only music I can think of that still has an element of “traditional songwriting” is his fantastic 2015 release, Simple Songs (also featuring Eiko Ishibashi, Jim’s partner in life and in song). Either way, his home in Japan has allowed him a new community of collaborators, musicians whose own avant garde, jazz, and post-WhatEverGenre leanings have inspired Jim to push his music into realms that are stranger yet.
Pareidolia is a byproduct of Jim and Eiko’s European tour in 2023. These improvisations were captured in Padova and Paris, edited and mixed after returning home to Japan. I’m going to say Steamroom again, only because the sonic excursions found on this record feel like something fit for, or pulled from, that project. There is a restless energy in the music. Across these four tracks, the songs behave as if they are acted upon by some external force, subjected to the waves and weather like a vessel on the water. The myriad voices on the record are seamless blends of instruments both electric and acoustic, the two artists blurring the intersection where these sounds meet. No liner notes give away what instruments or effects were used. There’s certainly a trumpet, a flute, some strings, but whether these are played live or recorded samples is anyone’s guess. Additionally, these recognizable voices are obfuscated in how they bleed into other elements. Textures rub up against drifting melodies. A synth’s bilious burbles lap at notes until they crack and dissolve.
The four tracks on this record bear the name of the album, each song a syllable, “Par,” “Ei,” “Do,” “Lia.” In my several listens through this record, fully submerged in the ninth month of the year 2025, my mind assigns this music as the score to our current reality. I hear familiar sounds—the strings, the flute, floating by like a cloud until skewered by the mechanical roar of a jet. Cloud no more, and in its place the long straight line of a contrail.
“Do” begins with the recognizable sounds of human speech. Listening closely though, it’s just the synthetic sound of a voice, the cadence of conversation. Each sonic element drifts into the foreground and materializes as a solid, concrete vision (I hear the reeds of a wind instrument and I hold it in my mind), but the longer I grasp at it the more it flees into the realm of 1s and 0s. The shiny glimmer of this facade can never stay too long, and ultimately it betrays itself. Gone into the harsh pixelated edges, those that once seemed so smooth.
The trio of musicians that make up Flur have quite a resume between them. Before recording this, their debut record, the three college friends previously collaborated with numerous artists—notably Floating Points and Shabaka Hutchings. The band has a unique make up of instruments, drums, saxophone, and harp. Novel in instrumentation alone, the music captured on Plunge provides a wide view of each musician’s capabilities. Though there is a great deal of variation when it comes to structure and focal point, the songs are all of a similar aesthetic and the album feels cohesive.
The music quite frequently verges on ambient in that—despite the percussion at the heart of the band, the instruments are rarely pulled into a single unified rhythm. There is a kind of temporal core that each musician plays around. Situated at specific offsets from each other, they wander from this detente, bounce off one another, and settle back into their orbits. This loose approach to rhythm seems in alignment with their broader approach to composition. Moving from improvisation, through written segments and back again, there is a smearing between these points where the magic of this music resides.
“Timaran I.” and “Timaran II.” are perfect demonstrations of this effect in action. If this is background listening, it’s particularly easy to miss the arc of the song. The harp and saxophone hold a dialog, underscored by drums that creak and tilt beneath the weight of these alternating voices. As the saxophone finds its footing, stepping into the spotlight, the harp twirls and threads arpeggios in the background. Then, like a person riding a unicycle on a tight rope, there’s a dance of shifting momentum. The harp accelerates out of the background while the saxophone begins its breathy lilt. They circle and meander so deliberately, so patiently, that it feels like being startled awake from a dream, momentarily assigning the night’s spun fictions for the cold sobriety of the day.
Mushroom Church Vol 1 by Modern Biology (Snakes x Ladders)
Modern Biology is the music/science project of Tarun Nayar. A cornerstone of his creative process is using sensors that connect to organic life. Reading the electrical changes that naturally occur in these organisms, this information is relayed to a purpose-built module that changes this constant stream of data into gate and control voltage signals—the foundational information needed to play a modular synthesizer.
Pushing this concept further yet, Mushroom Church is quite literally just that. Tarun and his collaborator(s) meet in a church, plug into the fungus of the day, listen to the plants, and build a song around the results. At various churches across the North American continent—and London—the musicians, poets, and scientists pool their efforts to connect directly with the wonder of nature. If this premise seems a bit too Haight Ashbury for you to enjoy, then maybe our feeds are overfull, pecked to death as we are by Xes (formerly Tweets). I’m on no soapbox here. I must admit an internal groan of cynicism when I encountered the lyrical invocation “What does it feel like to be a mushroom?” (Track 2, “To Be a Mushroom [Vancouver] feat. Mendel Skulski”). Friendly reminder, church is both place and community. It’s much easier to put yourself in the appropriate state of reverence in a garden, a park, or forest. It’s alright if this choice requires some deliberate action on the part of the listener. The importance of this as the central mechanism across the album cannot be overstated.
Having brought yourself to the appropriate place, you may find you more easily connect with “The Many Ways of Fungi”, as explored by Giuliana Furci. Of all the poems and recitations on this album, this stands as the thesis. An exercise in using your imagination to traverse the air, water, and soil of this earth, ushered along by a cloud of spores so you may momentarily inhabit numerous different funguses. As the list of species expands, their characteristics and uses pull the listener deeper into the magic of the natural world.
The album as a whole roots the congregant in the earth as sacred object. The ever-turning miracle of life, death, decay and rebirth is the very eternal soul of our planet. This is what eludes us in a nonconsensual reality derived from binary mechanisms: a spectrum of luminosity in existence beyond the monochromatic sensoriums that betray the very thing they purport to capture.
Honorable Mentions
smallest things by Memotone (World of Echo)
One thing that becomes clear early on in smallest things is that Will Yates begins to paint these worlds by looking through a microscope. As the sole performer on these tracks, he layers guitar, banjo, clarinet, cello, and others, into expansive songs that spin like rotoscopes. Each note, and every sound is placed so deliberately it’s like watching a Michelin Star chef use tweezers to place a garnish.
Songs rooted in jazz, Fahey-esque psychedelic folk, post-rock, and ambient sit shoulder to shoulder, describing environments seen through a viewfinder of rotating lenses. Each song has its own unique mood and structure, but they are held together as an album by the unifying power of Yates’ aesthetic concerns. There’s a closeness to the music, where the reverb feels like a by-product of the recording environment. The production on the album is in fantastic taste. This is yet another point that speaks to the artist’s vision, teasing out wide ranging compositions by relying on limitation and restraint.
Live at Gamma Festival by CPSL (Detroit Underground)
Captured from her 2024 performance at the St. Petersburg music festival, Maria Veretennikova offers up nearly an hour of gritty hypnosis. Like many other electronic albums rooted in percussion, the end result is more important than the constituent parts. Veretennikova checks the usual boxes: huge steady bass drum, breakbeats, various samples twisted into rhythmic elements, and a big dirty synth bouncing out a bass line.
Properly tweaked, this foundation pulls the listener deeper into the music. As repetition gives way to a dizzying abandon, the walls close in and clench our ears until this myopic perspective swallows us fully, our minds made malleable by rhythms’s spell. This is brought into sharper focus, and to greater effect, when the beats drop out, leaving room for a breath between thuds. Atmosphere reestablished, the percussion begins its work of mapping the space as every dozen or so bars find the music encroaching more and more. Seemingly moving the songs from a large hall into a coffin of bombast, these spatial shifts might be the most delicate thing happening in this music.
This performance is a reminder of how enough repetition can hammer through the dusty hum of our inner workings. These parts are layered so thickly, that it’s nearly impossible to listen to this album passively. It finds a way into the biomechanics of your person, prodding the listener into alignment with the beating heart of the songs.
Mentions (not without honor, just without text)
Utero Dei by Mondo Lava (Hausa Mountain Records)
Music For Writers by Steve Gunn (Three Lobed Recordings)
New Radiations by Marissa Nadler (Sacred Bones Records)
Ashes That Made the Shape of My Dreams by metra.vestlud (Not Not Fun)
well, here we are by Ian Hawgood (Quiet Details)