New York-based artist Eli Keszler is at the apex of his career. This year alone he’s had a three-month-long solo exhibition (“Blue Skies” at Fuse Arts, Bradford, UK), performed internationally in a duo with Laurel Halo, collaborated with noted Hungarian author László Krasznahorkai, taught experimental composition and performance at Camp in the Pyrenees mountains, composed music for Turner Prize–winning visual artist Laure Prouvost, and most recently embarked on a world tour with Oneohtrix Point Never.
“Stadium” is his new album for Shelter Press. As his ninth solo record,“Stadium” reflects his move from South Brooklyn to Manhattan, where he produced the album. The constant blurry motion and ever-changing landscapes of the fast-paced island helped him modify and shape his sound into a new kind of film noir. “After we moved into our East Village apartment,” Keszler explains, “we found a guitar pick on the floor that read ‘Stadium’. We looked at each other at the same time and had the same thought. It could have gone any number of ways.” Indeed, there is a startling amount of expression at play on each track, where intersections of melody, restraint and rhythm are used to challenge the idea of memory, impression and space.
Keszler is often mistaken for an electronic musician, but in fact his sounds are raw and natural, produced by hand live in-situ. His performance with the drumset and acoustic percussion are central to his work. He produces almost impossible textures through self-realized methodologies: cascading melodies, a shadow of voices, and a unique pointillistic materiality. Although playing with the intensity of digitally-created music, his communications are done live with no processing. These haptics are what give “Stadium” its depth and its warmth. In a recent interview for Dazed, collaborator Oneohtrix Point Never comments, “I’ve always described his playing as bacterial. He’s able to parallax into very small, very acute, very specific relationships between percussive textures. It’s beyond just being a drummer—he’s a world-building percussionist.”
In “Stadium,” Keszler uses lived experience to realize the most wide-ranging sound he’s created to date. “Stadium” draws out textures from overlapping geographies (from Shinjuku arcades to city streets and Brutalist architecture) and transforms these travelogue field recordings into starting points for composition. He then builds on these environments to create subliminal spaces for his percussion, keyboards and acoustic instruments. His “world-building” techniques are pushed to new levels with mesmerizing string and brass arrangements. Throughout the album, Keszler’s writing, keyboard playing and scoring operate like a sonic channel that transports the listener into a quaking web.
Perhaps this is the “stadium” referred to in the title: a larger network of sound and bodies moving continually, oscillating and turning in on itself. Keszler has explored these ideas before both in his visual work and sound installations—especially notable on projects such as his massive Manhattan Bridge installation ‘Archway’ or his Boston City Hall work «Northern Stair Projection.» “Stadium” takes these long-running ideas to new depths. “My installations work with massive city spaces for a complex of individuals,” Keszler states. “The recordings on Stadium are inverted. They are landscapes scaled for the singular. Like a mass collecting in one arena, this music compresses city spaces, genre and instrumentalism into an amorphous form. On the record, there are ruptures of information and happenstance. Like a game, it could go any number of ways.”

From Geneva Skeen
As I’ve tried to understand what is happening now without judgement––a collapse of systems, boundaries, and symbols that crumble faster with each forcible attempt to reinstate them––I am finding equal failure in streamlined, singular methodologies for both comprehension and composition. Outside, reason and rationale wane in heft and clarity. Representation in a world that refuses fact is uncertain and deceptive. Time is complicated by the failure of the linear. Inside, what we see is not what we hear, what we hear is not what we think, what we think is not what we feel, and so on.
The dread incited by this precarity is difficult to interpret without announcing failure: the anxiety of watching our own hourglass is palpable and demanding. I feel existence in this moment has required a move away from my own humanity in order to simply live in it, live through it, live with it while refusing to release the idea of environmental recovery. It is to request your humanity to unwillingly shift, to mutate toward something sharply resilient and relentless. The sounds on this record embody this sense of mutant consciousness. It is, for me, a representation of a vigorous sprint towards complexity, towards the interdependencies that serve as stop-gaps, towards freaky, slippery, compounded stacks of reality.
The title, A Parallel Array of Horses, is derived from a geologic phenomenon in which a block of a specific type of rock has been completely separated by mineral veins from its counterpart within another body of rock, and then stacked upon multiples of others like it. Sounds on this record are both recorded and produced: the album opens with recordings of a Mojave wind storm and closes with the world’s largest colony of Mexican free-tailed bats departing their cave to roam the summer night air of Southeast Texas. Both scenes are landscapes of precarity, politically or meteorologically or otherwise. Interspersed are a variety of electronic instruments and processes, and compositional techniques that are variously clear-cut or intentionally buried by digital processing. Tracks three and four are composed entirely with my own voice––my own body as the original playback mechanism for experiencing the world, but manipulated, elaborated upon, and layered to express a more complex interpretation of that subjective reality.
Through listening, I find myself able to retrace my steps back to a sense of decentered, porous presence––the present is still here, with all of its shifts and confusion and valuable interdependencies. No matter is created or destroyed, only new forms arise.

The Los Angeles musician’s fifth studio album is the most joyous, daring realization of her experimental tendencies yet: a sprawling, 90-minute search for meaning in a dehumanizing age.

Mary Mary is a female American urban contemporary gospel duo composed of sisters Erica Atkins-Campbell and Trecina Atkins-Campbell. Formed in 1998, Mary Mary was launched into mainstream recognition following the release of their best-selling debut album, Thankful, which contained the hit single "Shackles".

瓊·拜亞，美國鄉村民謠女歌手，作曲家。她的很多作品都與時事和社會問題有關，並於1960年代活躍於反戰運動。

Combining elements of horror-film soundtracks, psychedelic doom, and atmospheric noise, INSECT ARK is comprised of Dana Schechter (bass, lap steel guitar, synthesizers) and Ashley Spungin (drums, synthesizers). INSECT ARK’s intensely visual music weaves interludes of fragile beauty with crushing passages of swirling doom, spinning like a backwards fever dream. “Marrow Hymns” is a wordless song, a hypnotic voice that screams and whispers from a place deep in the furrows, from the bones, from the blood. Defying easy categorization, INSECT ARK’s uncommon sound is in part the amalgamation of these two women’s passions: Schechter’s sinister bass lines and unconventional use of lap steel guitar (and her complete omission of electric guitar), and Spungin’s lucid, exacting drumming and synth work with her own hand-built analog noise pedals (Ormus Electronics).
“Marrow Hymns” was recorded and mixed with engineer Ethan Donaldson at Mozart St Studios in Brooklyn, NY, over the course of eighteen months. With the two halves of INSECT ARK residing on opposite coasts, the album was largely skeletal in form upon commencement of recording. Overdubs and further writing/arrangements were done after Spungin’s return to Portland in the isolation of Schechter’s home studio. The sense of distance and vast emptiness remained intact in the songs, built out over many long nights.
“Marrow Hymns” song themes of displacement, loss, and isolation are personal journals of that time period, as both members found themselves simultaneously experiencing existential crises. However, the album also tells a story of strength and determination, made from the marrow of these two women, a song for all things that struggle to survive.
Formed in 2011 by Schechter (who has also been part of bands such as M. Gira’s Angels Of Light, Bee and Flower, Zeal & Ardor, Gnaw, and cult Bay Area math rock band Gifthorse which was Jef Whitehead of LEVIATHAN’s first active band) as a solo project, from its inception Insect Ark has been about creating work that transports, both physically and psychologically. Spungin (Taurus, Purple Rhinestone Eagle, Negative Queen) joined in 2015 for touring support of “Portal/Well” and over the next year, Insect Ark became something much greater than the sum of its parts. Both women have roots firmly in making work with no borders – they are DIY makers, multi-instrumentalists, gearheads, and visual artists. Spungin studies live sound, studio recording, programming and analog electronics; Schechter composes music for film and is a video maker/animator for film/TV. A full-length video counterpart for live shows is to come shortly, integrating sound and visuals to build immersive sonic landscapes that echo in the empty spaces where the earth divides, offering the listener - and the band themselves - utter sensory submersion.

Last week, AUGUST BURNS RED announced its early 2019 tour plans. The band will headline "The Dangerous Tour", presented by Sound Rink, alongside FIT FOR A KING, MISS MAY I and CRYSTAL LAKE. The band also dropped the video for "Dangerous", featuring Big Foot. The winter 2019 headline tour kicks off January 24 in Lexington, Kentucky and runs through March 2 in Poughkeepsie, New York. The trek includes several dates in Canada.

Baltimore dream pop duo Beach House have released “Alien,” an outtake from the recording sessions of the band’s 2018 album 7. The track is available as the b-side to the 7″ single of the song “Lose Your Smile.”
The 7″ initially existed as a limited edition release that was only available during their European tour, but now anyone can order it. Perhaps Beach House was moved to release the 7″ to a wider audience after “Alien” leaked onto the internet earlier this month. Beach House made the track available to stream on YouTube and paired it with animator San Charoenchi’s visuals.

Premonitions begins with "Thingamajig" -- something you can't quite recall the name of, but you know exactly what it means and what it feels like. Like the pull of desire that comes with not quite remembering fully. The magnetism of something just on the tip of your tongue. I wanted the album to feel like that thing.
I think a lot about about memory-making as an act of creation, the words we use to describe a memory give shape to and sometimes mutate the memory itself. I believe that the way we choose to describe the events of our lives is not only a means of creative fulfillment, but an absolutely vital part of creating the world we want to live in. When we are dishonest in the present, we create a dishonest future. When we are honest in the present, we create a more honest future. I wanted this album to be the vehicle for a hopeful, truthful, generous, and loving world. I tried not to posture or pretend. I wrote about my life as I've seen it and how I'd like to see it, as both memory and premonition.
The producers, Justin Raisen and Yves Rothman, and I spent months collecting organic sounds to fill the world of this record. We threw away everything that felt false and tried to keep the soul of each song alive. I hope Premonitions gives you comfort and joy. I hope it feels like all the mysterious details of your lives, all your massive and mundane glories. I hope it reminds you that there is beauty in the details. Rainbows in your sprinklers. Drinking water from a hose. The way it felt to make a friend for the first time. Locking yourself in a bathroom to avoid everyone. Dancing until your shins burn. Leaving your phone in an Uber and making your best friend drive you an hour away to knock on a stranger's door after locating it on Find My Phone. Losing a friend. Losing yourself. Remembering.