Emily A. Sprague’s 'Cloud Time' traces an audio-spiritual journey through time and place, recorded across a long-awaited debut tour of Japan in the fall of 2024. Compiled from environmental improvisations captured in and for the moment, material at once welcoming, responsive, and inimitable, the album distills a voyage guided by psychic wayfaring, unbound presence, and activating performance for a reciprocal exchange with space, listener, and each fully engaged instant. The Japanese tour documented on 'Cloud Time' held an almost mythic significance for Sprague, taking on properties of her own sonic white whale. After many near-departures and dropped plans to play in the country, “the empty spaces of cancelled trips and forgotten music turned into strange little misty spirits that I felt followed by,” she says. “When I began preparing for the tour, I couldn’t shake a sense that the invitation to Japan was more about opening myself up to this new place instead of bringing something into it tightly under my control. Improvisation has always been such a pillar in my music practice, and I really wanted to meet the country, spaces and people through that process.” 

TRACK LISTING

1. Tokyo 1
2. Osaka
3. Nagoya
4. Matsumoto (Beginning)
5. Matsumoto (Ending)
6. Hokkaido
7. Tokyo 2
8. Each Story 

Becoming Peter Ivers tells the story of the late Peter Ivers, a virtuosic songwriter and musician whose antics bridged not just 60s counterculture and New Wave music but also film, theatre, and music television.

Written and recorded in Los Angeles in the mid-to-late-1970s, Becoming Peter Ivers raises the curtain on this mischievous master of ceremonies, who, harmonica in hand, rarely missed a chance to light up an audience. Since his untimely death in 1983, Ivers’ short but storied life has been the subject of much research and remembrance. Becoming Peter Ivers is the most expansive effort yet to collect his archival recordings.

“Demos are often better than records,” Ivers wrote. “More energy, more soul, more guts.” The statement anticipates the appearance of Becoming Peter Ivers, which was assembled from a trove of demo cassettes and reel-to-reel tapes that Ivers recorded variously at his home in Laurel Canyon, Los Angeles, and Hollywood studios for a pair of major label albums in 1974 and 1976. While the two commercially released albums feature the resources of session musicians and state-of-the-art studio detail, Becoming Peter Ivers highlights the private moments of Ivers’ musical energy, frequently pared down to piano, drum machine, harmonica, and Peter’s ageless voice.

Though technically not Ivers’ debut album (in 1969 Epic Records released Knight Of The Blue Communion, Peter’s psychedelic jazz odyssey of sorts), Terminal Love was the A&R brainchild of music legend Van Dyke Parks. Already a masterful harmonica player (respectively mentored by blues legend Little Walter and jazz bassist Buell Neidlinger while he was a student at Harvard in the late 60s), Ivers wove his harp melodies through the sensuously coloured but unconventionally arranged pop compositions of Terminal Love and its self-titled follow up, which, like the New York Dolls at the same time, explored the libidinous, ironic, and artful possibilities of the rock template.

A studious artist, Ivers recorded hundreds of writing and rehearsal sessions onto reel-to reel and cassette tapes, but notes were either scarcely kept or have since been lost. RVNG Intl. collaborated with Ivers’ long-time friend and supporter Steven Martin, as well as his lifelong companion Lucy Fisher, to tell an intimate story of Peter’s creative journey through this untold music. The collection includes tracks that recurred in Ivers’ ouvre over the years; “Alpha Centauri,” “Eighteen And Dreaming,” “Miraculous Weekend.” And, of course, “In Heaven” – the song co-written with David Lynch and commissioned by the filmmaker to be featured in a now-iconic scene of Eraserhead. An accomplished Yogi by the late 70s, Ivers was as spiritual as he was playful. Accentuated by his cherubic face and compact height, Ivers’ vitality and curiosity became a part of his poetic sensibility, a quality that also characterizes his singing voice. Fisher remembers Ivers calling his days holed up in the studio as “snowy days,” as if he had been cut from school and let free to roam on his own. “No one knows what Peter Ivers does on a snowy day,” he would say.

In 1980, Ivers became involved with the Los Angeles-area public access show New Wave Theatre, serving as its host and paternal misfit. Ivers would introduce a new generation of groups like Fear, Dead Kennedys, and Suburban Lawns while playing a kind-of “straight” man, deliberately baiting the punks with square questions and frocked fashion. His signature question to guests was delivered deadpan: “What is the meaning of life?” Ivers died, tragically, the victim of a violent homicide in 1983 that remains unsolved. A shock to his community, his death all but fazed the LAPD, who treated the investigation with less than minimum care. A labor of love that took RVNG Intl. over five years to complete, Becoming Peter Ivers re-frames Peter’s music as the centerpiece of his captivating story, concentrating on the work he made during his numerous retreats into art, or, as he put it, during his snowy days. 

TRACK LISTING

01. Take Your Chances With Me
02. Eighteen And Dreaming
03. Love Is A Jungle
04. Conference Call At Four
05. Peter
06. Even Stephen Foster
07. I’m Sorry Alice
08. Deborah
09. Miraculous Weekend
10. Holding The Cobra
11. Audience Of One
12. Alpha Centauri
13. I’ve Seen Your Face
14. My Grandmother’s Funeral
15. In Heaven
16. My Desire
17. The Night You Didn’t Come
18. Untitled
19. Love In Flight (Piano Overture)
20. Ain’t That A Kick
21. Jamaica Moon
22. Happy On The Grill
23. Window Washer (w/ Van Dyke Parks)
24. You Used To Be Stevie Wonder 
25. Nirvana Cuba Walt

Only the Blues is an introduction deferred, and it is the debut album by Dylan Moon. Across its 35 minutes, we are rarely made to understand what, exactly, the source of Moon’s blues is, how that feeling has mutated, or whether there is a life beyond the small rooms and cramped spaces where this music was made. If not opaque, this first meeting with Moon is at least hazily translucent.

This makes Only the Blues something of an esoteric response to an age of radical transparency. Broadly speaking, Moon works in the field of folk music. But from this pasture, he glances pathways to digression; seeking scenic routes and counterintuitive cartography, trusting that even the most aimless trip becomes lucid if the foggy details are documented well enough.

On this trip, images spill from Moon, and most of them seem foreboding. We are given the sense - both from his lyrics and from the viscous mood he creates, using electronic manipulation to send his songs down compositional egresses, from which they emerge with a mysterious residue - that things have not been going well. Even the most saccharine memories, dancing before a freshly lit fire or hanging out with childhood cartoons come to life, feel caked with a hidden history.

Moon studied electronic production and sound design at music school, and then moved to Los Angeles in hopes of working in the film industry. While simultaneously graduating from pop to psych to prog to beat-making, he returned to traditional songwriting on the west coast, working out his ideas over a pair of self-released EPs. He also stumbled upon an ancient drum machine with scratched contact points and seventy years spent under restless thumbs, finding a kind of sonic entropy in its past-futurist rhythm signals that serve as Only the Blues’ spiritual center.

The album was recorded in Moon’s bedrooms in L.A. and Boston, small spaces made more claustrophobic by the soundproofing he hammered into the doors and the bedding he leaned against the walls. A single soul, spinning away (and out) in a cramped room: It’s a state of mind — and being — that Moon used his formal training to refine across Only the Blues. This is an album ornate with so many musical ideas to express that it teeters between ecstasy and anxiety.

That anxious quality is also what makes Only the Blues endlessly captivating. Moon moves quickly, courting the madcap at the center of his songs and just as quickly retreating to the fray. Processed guitars appear for a measure and disappear. His voice, a brittle croon reaching reedy highs and bottoming out into throaty baritone, wears tape hiss like a scarf while gently interlocking instrumental figures go nude below. The drum machine melts into a puddle of reverb.

Only the Blues uses obfuscation as a mode of confession, so long as we mean “confession” in the conventional sense. Moon is not hiding, but he is deliberately deciding: choosing how to be vulnerable, how to reveal, when to let go, when to move on. It’s not the way we usually meet one another. Maybe it should be.

TRACK LISTING

A1. Hope Dog
A2. Death Warmed
A3. Rosy
A4. Chimneys
A5. A Witch
A6. Analog
A7. Blue Jean
B1. Collapse
B2. Song For Jerry
B3. Interlude
B4. Lines
B5. Faraway Places
B6. Morning Limbo
B7. Mind Troubles

Colin Self’s Siblings is a proposal for interdependence, critical joy, and an expansive sense of being. As the lyrics beam, “I used to live as an anomaly... no explanation biologically,” so siblings share hidden language, lore, and identity. On Siblings, ecstatic voices and sound knot to form new ideals of kinship, emerging as horizontal relations for multi-species flourishing.

Colin Self challenges boundaries of perception with his art, music, and performances. Inspired by the work of Donna Haraway (Cyborg Manifesto, Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene), Siblings is the final segment of the six-part opera series entitled Elation. Informed by Self’s exploration of the ways of knowing, Siblings places a non-biological family at its center. The characters, bonded by curiosity and caring, generate ways of collectively coming together on a damaged planet. Self uses Siblings to define this familial experience through sound and its soundmakers.

Siblings is a mobile, transitional production, in equal parts by circumstance and happenstance. Field fragments taken from Halloween party laughter in Jamaica Plains and a cross-country video chat are refracted by session recordings willed to happen in places as far flung as Stockholm and Los Angeles. Siblings is a sound scrapbook or poster board collage, but not one without careful consideration of the clipping and composition.

From years experiencing Riot Grrrl shows around Self's early home of Oregon to his involvement in the New York City-based performance collective Chez Deep, Self expands the DIY ethos to a space and mind of Do-It-Together. Feeding into Siblings is XHOIR, Self’s ongoing project of group vocal workshops for singing and listening, and a broad cast of kin including but not limited to Michael Beharie, Greg Fox (drums), Martine Syms (words and voice), The Mivos Quartet, and Raul De Nieves (cover art).

On “Story,” Siblings’ opening moment, breath and beats emerge as echoes within a vast, heaving chamber, sound conjured and cajoled into a new, blistered terrain. “Foresight” urges us toward a worlding - a break from the planet we’ve disregarded: “I see on my screen all the doubt, where it comes from, why you trust in no one. I see a new light.” While the unhinged form of “Ante-Strategy” lays the sonic compost for a Belurusian political poem, written with Tanya Zamirouskaya and Anastasia Kolas, Self tends toward elaboration and excesses in a “joyous rendering of survival.”

Siblings splits sides with “Transitions,” a pluri-vocal burst called forth from interstellar margins to put uncounted bodies in motion. Repetitions of “I commit to you” end with “We commit to you.” Self utilizes theoretical vocabulary to encourage germination of a new language. “Research Sisters” will make their own myths and forge their own families, the work’s fire sparking frenetic, ecstatic voices flashing back and forth in stereo. The gathering of choral voices lift up the melancholic words of “The Great Refusal” over pillowy layers of strings and stumbling, sputtering showers of keyboards.

TRACK LISTING

1. Story
2. Foresight
3. Survival
4. Quorum Feat. Aunt Sister
5. Ante-Strategy
6. Stay With The Trouble (For Donna)
7. Emblem
8. Transitions
9. Research Sister
10.Uncounted
11.The Great Refusal

Few Traces surveys a near decade of Mark Renner’s scarcely released and unreleased material from 1982 to 1990, embracing and evoking the timelessness of his artistic statement: a wordless translation of the individual’s musical experience, met with the poetic expression of being here.

Mark Renner first encountered punk while a teenager in Upperco, a country town in rural Maryland. Growing up on his family farm, he became a young acolyte of the British exports hitting not-so-distant Baltimore record store shelves in 1979 / 1980 and was baited by an area musician-wanted ad declaring Ultravox a primary touchstone.

This nascent band and a pair of other group experiments flamed out under the typical totem of despotism. In their ashes Renner began recording independently around 1983 with a portable four-track, electric guitar, and classic Casio CZ101 synthesizer. Aside from John Foxx-era Ultravox, Renner’s process was inspired by the period’s electronic pioneers venturing into deeper, romantic pop pastures: Yellow Magic Orchestra, Bill Nelson, The Associates.

With his tools and teachers in place, the blueprints for Renner’s sound were laid out – metronomic, skeletal rhythms built on sturdy yet singular drum machines supporting luminescent guitar and synth lines, Renner’s reverent voice guiding the fables and construction.

Most directly influential, Renner’s enthusiasm for Days in Europa, the third album by Scottish new wave band Skids, would lead to a correspondence and long-distance tutorship with Stuart Adamson. Before Adamson would achieve worldwide success co-founding the group Big Country, a chance friendship with Renner would impart great confidence in the young musician from Maryland, who, after a visit in Edinburgh, would then travel to London to demo an early version of “Half A Heart” featured in its final form on Few Traces.

The sum of Renner’s music is one-part literary, one-part painterly. The artist cites the individualism of Herman Hesse as a guiding force, and there are overt references to W. B. Yeats and John Greanleaf Whittier among other authors. Lyrical themes evoke the presence of the ancient past, much like early Felt songs or the spiritual visions of Van Morrison. (Tellingly, Renner cites Morrison’s 1980s albums made between Inarticulate Speech of the Heart and No Guru, No Method, No Teacher as musical influences.)

Apart from his writing, Renner explored music as a complement to visual language: many of the dream-like instrumental passages presented across Few Traces were originally implemented as sound elements for exhibitions of his paintings. Renner pursued wordless music as a pure aesthetic in its own right, pristinely balanced segues and open-ended compositions that lead to pasture but not without shepherd.

Compiled three decades after the music was originally put to tape, Few Traces collects Mark Renner’s early music but strives not to simplify or reframe it. (Mark is still active making music and painting) The instrumental explorations remain on par with the great ambient adventurers of the period (Brian Eno, Harold Budd, Roedelius), while the vocal and guitar-centric songs crystalize across similar terrains being transversed by Cocteau Twins and The Chills.

Few Traces highlights in intuitive sequence gems from Renner’s scarce discography and archive: the self-released debut All Walks of This Life (1986), the aptly titled follow-up Painter’s Joy (1988), plus early singles, compilation tracks, and exemplary songs that saw no original release. The collection allows an intimate look at an artist growing into their sound and surroundings, finding the in between echoes and spirituality of the individual.

TRACK LISTING

1. Riverside
2. Saints And Sages
3. Few Traces
4. Half A Heart
5. Princes Street
6. The Mirror At Saint Andrews
7. The Wild House
8. The Dyer’s Hand
9. A Fountain In The Cloister
10. James Cowie (The Portrait Group)
11. Autumn Calls You By Name
12. Ageless
13. Jars Of Clay
14. More Or Less
15. The Eternal Purpose
16. The Sun In His Head, A Storm In His Heart
17. The Man & The Echo
18. As Big As Trees
19. Yeats, And The Golden Dawn
20. It Might Have Been
21. Wounds