Audiobook, the new project from prolific multi-instrumentalist Sam Gendel and visual artist/filmmaker

Marcella Cytrynowicz, is comprised of 13 alphabetically-named tracks and corresponding illustrations that feel like dispatches from outer space, or unearthed ancient runes. At points melodic and cartoonish and at others glitching and somewhat unnerving, it’s a visual work and instrumental album rooted in a strange in-between, in a shadowy and vivid chasm between terrestrial and otherworldly. A puzzle that doesn’t ask to be completed, but invites you to play.

Cytrynowicz and Gendel have been consistent collaborators since 2020, with Cytrynowicz providing photography as well as music videos and visuals, including for Gendel’s DRM and their AE-30 documentary, and with Gendel contributing snippet scores to her own short-form video work.

AUDIOBOOK is the meeting of something distinctly analog weaving into a soundscape that could be at home in a 90s sci-fi soundtrack, the parallel play of a visual artist and prolific musician, abstract art and sound reaching out to touch. “It’s the sound of us just individually trusting ourselves, and then aligning the two together and letting them meet, and also trusting in that,” Gendel says. “I don’t think about it that directly, though – this isn't art inspired by art. I would say this is just a piece showing two people trusting in their subconscious and then trusting in that meeting point, wherever that is. And shepherding it along.”

TRACK LISTING

1. AB
2. CD
3. EF
4. GH
5. IJ
6. KL
7. MN
8. OP
9. QR
10. ST
11. UV
12. WX
13. YZ

The long-awaited reissue of The Dead Tongues' beloved third album, Unsung Passage, a profound reflection on the emotional architecture of love, loneliness, and life at large.

The Dead Tongues is songwriter Ryan Gustafson's long-evolving vehicle for a beautifully fractured vision of folk, country, blues, and cosmic American rock, and Unsung Passage is a first-person reckoning with the things Gustafson, a chronically peripatetic adventurer, has seen enough to sing about. The ten remarkable tracks of Unsung Passage are long-distance distillations of events lived and places seen and pondered and ultimately poured into reflective anthems for our harried times.

During "Like a Dream," a gentle gallop of grinning harmonica and trickling guitar, Gustafson explores the balance of existence from a hillside vantage. He sees the curveof the earth while pondering his need for a paycheck, a moment that eternally pits the banal against the beautiful. "The Broken Side of People Everywhere" is a gorgeous love song written with the wisdom of someone who knows that nothing is forever or perfect, that there's no real risk in a life where everything ends, anyway. There are meditations on mortality and devotion (the flute-laced dream "My Other"), on money and temporality (the banjo trot "The Giver"), and on impermanence and acceptance (the achingly gorgeous "Pale November Dew").

This isn't Gustafson's idle speculation about life and the world: these are the realizations of a restless mind, of a songwriter who sings "this old town ain't gonna watch m edie" and means it.

TRACK LISTING

1. Won't Be Long
2. Ebb And Flow
3. Pale November Dew
4. My Other
5. Like A Dream
6. Unsung Passage
7. The Broken Side Of People Everywhere
8. Thunder And Crash
9. TheGiver
10. Clip Your Wings

"Darkness Darkness" and “No Services” are songs by Kieran Hebden (Four Tet) and William Tyler.

The first song “Darkness, Darkness” contains samples from Gloria Loring's version of "Darkness, Darkness." The songs were produced by Kieran Hebden. The guitar was performed by William Tyler and recorded by Jake Davis at Huge Planet in Nashville.

STAFF COMMENTS

Matt says: Kieran Hebden returns to his real name moniker and the electro-acoustic, vivid pastoral elegance that made his early catalogue so infamous. "Darkness, Darkness" is a moving, emotional titan of live drum breaks and multi-layered instrumentation; rising to an incredible climax of soaring guitar feedback & distorted electronics.

TRACK LISTING

1. Darkness, Darkness
2. No Services

Tim Bernardes, a Latin Grammy nominated singer, songwriter, musician, composer, and producer from São Paulo, Brazil, has just announced the release of his forthcoming album Mil Coisas Invisíveis on Psychic Hotline. Bernardes has captivated global audiences with his delicate balance between sounds seeped in Brazilian tradition and contemporary indie and folk that is deeply warm, intimate, emotionally resonant and healing. He’s collaborated with the likes of Fleet Foxes, Tom Zé, David Byrne, Gal Costa, Devendra Banhart, Shintaro Sakamoto, and more. Mil Coisas Invisíveis is his second solo album, following his 2017 debut Recomeçar. The album was written primarily while touring with his acclaimed tropicalia-indie group O Terno, and heading into 2020, which is when he decided to step back from touring and focus on new songs. What emerged was an album that is generous and intimate- a series of meditations on metaphysical transformation in the face of grave uncertainty. The first single, ‘Nascer Vivier Morrer’ opens the album, tracing the journey of life from birth to death. One of the last songs written for the album, Tim feels that it connects the rest of the songs on the album- ‘I understand how the album looked from the outside and understand how it accentuated this conscious shift in me.’ The song says a lot in a few words, meditating on the magical experience of existence and presence. Joyful and introspective, the song is carried by simple instrumentation and layered vocals that render the song remarkably intimate. "This is a very short song that when I wrote I felt it fit as kind of an opening to the album. The songs in the album have some different vibes between them but I feel that this one connects them in a very synthetic way. Trying to say a lot with few words. About 'just being', about how magical the existence of existence is. About the presence of presence, and presence of absence in life. Like the song says, 'in the rare infinite moment, to live.” Says Tim about ‘Nascer Vivier Morrer’ 

Alexandra Sauser-Monnig and Amelia Meath have been yodeling together for upwards of fifteen years – in the backseat of a Prius while on their first cross-country tour, on back porches and backstages. It’s what led them to Fruit, their debut release as The A’s – a joyous ten-song collection spanning genre and decades, with interpretations of traditionals, lullabies, and an original song, it weaves between the weird and the wonderful. “Why I’m Grieving,” originally recorded by the DeZurik Sisters, was the inspiration for the A’s existence. The A’s reach into the past to hold hands with the DeZurik Sisters, two farm girls from rural Minnesota who taught themselves to yodel amongst all their animals, in a continuing celebration of the tradition of folk eccentricity and whimsy.

The A’s played their first show together in 2013 after Sauser-Monnig first moved to North Carolina, where Meath had been living at the time, but it wasn’t until summer 2021 that they thought seriously about making Fruit. They decamped to Sylvan Esso’s Chapel Hill studio, Betty’s, for two weeks in the midst of a balmy and blooming Carolinian summer. They rehearsed during the day, deconstructing yodeling parts phonetically and staring absurdly into each other’s eyes as they practiced tongue twisting harmonies - and recorded in the nighttime, candles lit, a flickering glow against the windows framing the violet twilight outside.

“There was a lot of giggling during the session,” Sauser-Monnig explains. “At one point I was getting a tangle out of my hair and was like, oh, my God, that sounds really cool – the sound of my hands in my hair. And then I thought, what if we recorded hair for a percussion track? And then it just sort of snowballed.” Across the record, the A’s employ a bizarre-o ghost orchestra of strange noises that are percussive and melodic. The credits include nylon shorts, string (singular), hair, shoes, ice chunk, gravel, frog sample, and shoelace, among other unexpected makeshift instrumentation. The backing band is built out by a more traditional group of players: saxophone from Sam Gendel on “Copper Kettle,” backing vocals from Jenn Wasner (Flock of Dimes, Wye Oak) on “When I Die,” string arrangements from Gabriel Kahane on “He Needs Me,” and more.

Fruit is made up simply of songs the A’s love to sing – there are lullabies and love songs; “He Needs Me,” written by Harry Nilsson and first released by Shelley Duvall in the 1980 Popeye film; traditional ballads like “Swing and Turn Jubilee,” “Copper Kettle” and closer “Buckeye Jim,” a multiplying song about frogs and nature. The sole original track to appear on the album is the penultimate “When I Die,” written by Meath. It contains both wishes and instructions for the celebration of her death, a low synth bubbling beneath Sauser-Monnig and Meath’s voices. It’s a collection of ten seemingly incongruous songs, but with the throughline of Sauser-Monnig and Meath’s vocals and sense of humor working in tandem, they fit together into a cosmic yodeling-folk masterpiece. Fruit feels like blowing the dust off a precious artifact of decades past, but also winking and modern. Sauser-Monnig sums up their ethos on the project succinctly: “If it doesn’t make you cackle or cry, it doesn’t belong.”

TRACK LISTING

01 He Needs Me
02 Swing And Turn Jubilee
03 Wedding Dress
04 Why I’m Grieving
05 When The Bloom Is On The Sage
06 My Poncho Pony
07 Go To Sleep My Darling Baby
08 Copper Kettle
09 When I Die
10 Buckeye Jim

Recorded in a little bedroom studio out in Durham, North Carolina, Amelia Meath and Nick Sanborn's debut LP as Sylvan Esso arrived in 2014 at the juncture of pop and experimental. Even now, years later, the LP remains an urgent and fitting introduction to a push-and-pull that would go on to inform the duo's sound - a thoughtful headiness that also wants you to get out on the dance floor. A blend of analog and digital, Meath and Sanborn were two unexpected puzzle pieces fitting together with singular ease, producing a ten-track LP that was both minimalist and shimmering, with dark undulations rippling beneath the synthy-surface and crystalline quality of Meath's voice.

Before all of the international touring and festival headlining and critical acclaim, Sylvan Esso was just a shot-in-the dark of musical chemistry gone right. The original album bio for the self-titled presciently sets the stage for the thesis that has gone on to guide Meath and Sanborn's writing since then: "a collection of vivid addictions concerning suffering and love, darkness and deliverance" arriving as "a necessary pop balm, an album stuffed with songs that don't suffer the longstanding complications of that term." And so, even as the band continues to evolve and becomes amorphous, there's still that argument about what pop can be at its core. This is just the beginning of that conversation captured on tape.

TRACK LISTING

1.HeyMami
2. DreamyBruises
3. CouldIBe
4 .Wolf
5. Dress
6. H.S.K.T.
7. Coffee
8. Uncatena
9. PlayItRight
10. ComeDown