For this reason, algorithmic music always appeared to me as liberating. When you are dealing with a coding environment, you are not compelled to understand it through the lens of instrumentality. The disembodied realm of programming is all about translating musical ideas into formal abstractions, which in turn render sound concrete. It is an open-ended system that can be continuously reconfigured. Its shapeshifting nature contradicts the stability and permanence of a traditional musical instrument. While it requires to learn and master many concepts and skills, the practice of algorithmic music has very little to do with the competitiveness of playing music. Sure, musical communities always exhibit the tendency to find metrics – Is your code improvised? Are you using your own sounds? Is the language difficult? – but there is really no system of reference through which these metrics could ever hold any significance. At the same time, interpreted programming languages act as performative environments in which sound can be created and transformed in real time, a practice I deeply enjoy as I think it allows to perform the most musical activity: playing with others, now, here, spontaneously. In the past years, I dedicated most of my creative activity to playing purely improvised music in trios. My current trio is called Crogiolo and our endeavour is to play collective music without any prescription, but also without excluding tropes from preexisting music: while most of contemporary improvised music defines itself non-idiomatic, Crogiolo is intentionally idiosyncratic and rooted in multiple musical traditions – while, at the same time, not adhering to any of them fully.

Interestingly, playing with Crogiolo made me reconsider my idea of instrumentality. On a superficial level, looking at the trio you would think that two of the performers are playing conventional instruments (guitar and drums, respectively), while one is engaging with some sort of illegible digital wizardry. Yet, my comrades’ approach to playing is not less entangled and multi-dimensional than mine. Their instruments are assemblages, not simple tools. The drum comprises all sort of objects, some of them ephemeral and silly. The guitar is extended by a complex electroacoustic chain. Every time I push them to do something that would be outside of the conventional program of action of their instruments, such as dealing with microtonal harmonies, they always find a form of relation that is meaningful in the contingency of the performance. They are responsive to how the sonic atmosphere changes, much more than what a coding environment affords to me. While being infinitely reconfigurable, musical programming requires careful planning before being used in an improvisation. Its field of possibility is bounded by what has been defined in the code, and many abstractions are too complex to be formalized in the midst of an improvisation. Therefore, I started designing new algorithms before every rehearsal. Paradoxically, I spend much more time in preparation than them, as they are already accustomed with the limits and the opportunities given by their instruments and they are not obsessed by the neurotic strive for virtuosity. While their setup varies slightly every time, adding and removing elements to their assemblages in search for new sonorities, their instruments are relatively stable and grounded on specific physical affordances. My setup, instead, has transformed radically dozens of times: I changed three different operating systems, two laptops, three languages, two coding environments, countless software, not to mention the hundreds of updates to my codebase. After a year and a half, I moved out of pure coding and reached a configuration that is much more dependent on instrumental relationality with physical interfaces. I find myself being some sort of an instrumentalist.

The reasons for such a transformation are multiple and I think some of them transcend my particular case. A fundamental factor is the necessity of developing a responsive, diversified system of actions and interactions for improvisation. Despite being dynamic, a programming environment cannot count on centuries of organological development as musical instruments do. The stratification of centuries of practice into a material form affords instruments a level of sophistication and acoustic complexity that is rarely matched by the impermanence of coding. Another aspect I am reflecting upon in this period is how much our relationship with algorithms is changing in these years. The increasing autonomy of digital systems is realizing what Xenakis predicted in 1972 as the inevitable and completely automatized industrialization of music1. This emerging paradigm of music/slop production – if we allow ourselves to call “music” these new strange sonic objects – is reconfiguring the landscape of sonic practices. The autonomy of the machine produces two interacting phenomena: it de-skills and deprives people of their practical and noetic knowledge because it removes the economic opportunities to cultivate such knowledge, while encouraging oppositional re-evaluations of direct, unmediated production as a response. Such response is extremely performative in nature: it is not just about using physical instruments, but also about showing them. The mere fact of not using digital tools to relate with the world is seen as an intrinsic value. It produces a protestant rhetoric according to which the foundational aesthetic criteria is manifesting the hardship of craft behind making art: “what I do is meaningful because I spent a lot of effort in it”. I strongly reject this view, as I find it just another enactment of lutheran morality. Artmaking as a divine vocation manifested through the sacrifice of the self is a fascinating concept, but it ends up placing virtuosity once again as a core value.

What I propose, instead, is instrumentality beyond virtuosity, performativity without competition. In a world in which music can materialize itself mechanically, technical mastery cannot be an aspirational goal. Relating with an instrument is meaningful as long as it manifests a possibility of contingent relation with sound, in which the performer is in an embodied connection with the instrument, the other musicians, and the space in which music happens – something that algorithms cannot do. In this sense, possessing skills is important because extensive knowledge of a musical instrument affords many expressive possibilities, but it is not the purpose of playing. What counts is that our physical and noetic knowledge is shared and morphed in a collective ritual. The connective and social dimension of performativity lies at the core of this perspective. Playing an instrument is important because it allows you to participate in this experiential exchange. In this sense, everyone should be able to engage musically with technical objects of all kinds. It is maybe time to overcome the idea of musicians as a caste – playing is not a profession per se, but rather a specific historic and economic contingency that appears to be crumbling down. Playing music is a possibility of human relationality that should be shared among all of us as a precious form of embodied knowledge and participatory presence that no technocapitalist oppression can erase or substitute through mediated platforms. It is a form of gathering around a common experience of listening and soundmaking out of which any sort of experimental collectivity can emerge. This is what I’m focusing on at my university in relation with new emerging views on the pedagogy of music, as in professor Carla Cuomo’s understanding of listening and composing as essential collective practices for a cultivated democratic citizenship2.

A recent improvisation on a microtonal isomorphic keyboard with a custom tuning system.

In light of this perspective, what can you do? Take an instrument and just play it. Study its techniques and understand its functioning in all its depth, learn from others whatever you can, but do not obsess over perfection and idealized standards. If you find the discipline of studying an instrument constructive, go for it. If you don’t, focus on what that instrument affords in musical expression and what is fun for you, but do not abandon your playing practice just because it does not matches your preconceived expectations. Play with others. Find shared languages through which you can participate in a communal exchange. It does not mind if those languages are traditional or if you are finding your own. Most importantly, do not do that as a form of display. Anyone can learn playing difficult music if they dedicate time to it, but such dedication does not grant any relevant status. What you should look for is how being versed in a musical instrument allows you to relate with other people meaningfully in a dialogue, not in a contest. And if you already play an instrument, what I suggest you is to learn another one instead of obsessing over improving 1% in what you already know. Experiencing multiple forms of musicmaking through different instruments is a much more expansive endeavour. You will discover, as Wadada Leo Smith once said3, that being a multi-instrumentalist means considering all the instruments as a unique and complete field of sonic possibility. In that regard, these are the three directions in which my instrumentalism is developing at the moment:

• Expanding a known instrument with a new design. I played piano and keyboards for most of my life; now I’m engaging with isomorphic keyboard layouts. Not only they allow to play microtonal music with greater ease, but they also afford a geometrical intuition on intervallic and chordal relationships. The two-dimensional grid encourages faster phrasing, while color coding the keys is a great help to navigate complex pitch grids.

• Learning a completely new instrument. I recently started playing the soprano saxophone. It is my first reed instrument and it is rapidly reshaping my understanding of melody and note articulation. Contrarily to the keyboards, every pitch is topologically different from the other, it has its own geography. The soprano sax has a lot of quirks and asks you to connect a complex assemblage of breath, mouth, tongue, reed, mouthpiece, resonator, and fingers; dealing with its embodied complexity grants a very specific way of knowing and creating sound.

• Building your own instrument. I’ve been developing physical-digital instruments and interfaces for a while, using sensors or other types of control surfaces. Right now I’m experimenting with gamepads as musical controllers. I built several algorithms to be controlled from a gamepad, the most interesting one being a distorted physical model of a resonating tube. The gamepad has a compact set of ergonomic points of interaction that allows to build instruments with responsive behaviours.

Whatever you choose to play, I find extremely important that we collectively retain instrumental knowledge and expand it through communal relationships. Technocapitalism might take our jobs but it should not deprive us of the means for musical creativity and exchange: such type of exchanges, liberated from the poisoning of competition – the enactment of market logic into artistic expression – appears to me as the only antidote to the nihilistic social fragmentation we are experiencing right now.

We find ourselves growingly confronted with mood music albums made more for streaming platform playlists than for actual artistic necessity. Today, music is composed for algorithms, not for listeners. On the other hand, we are also seeing a proliferation of artists from privileged backgrounds, people who have the money and connections to work on their image, but very little intention to do anything interesting with sound. In all this, music produced mechanically without passion or history and published under false names is cluttering up streaming platforms, sometimes with the approval of the music industry itself, which is becoming interested in automating its production sector as much as possible. It is therefore a glorious period for the music industry and a dramatic period for music as an art form.

Every day, I thank the musicians who persist unconditionally in making radical music despite growing adversity. It is increasingly difficult to maintain contact with them, given the amount of informational noise that interferes with and hinders sincere communication, therefore it is increasingly important to support their work and circulate their music. Here are some of the radical music records that have impressed me the most this year and that I strongly suggest you to explore.

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Vanessa Rossetto – Pictures of the Warm South

(Erstwhile, CD or digital)

I’m not sure I can explain exactly why I find Vanessa Rossetto’s works so fascinating, but I can try to indicate a possible direction for listening. Rossetto, a Texan artist, has a habit of recording with her smartphone everything that happens in her life, from family conversations to the obtrusive chattering of the physical and media world that surrounds her. Her pieces are essentially audio autoethnographies, in which she combines, contrasts, and collides different moments of her life through symbolic or purely sonic associations. Unlike many of her colleagues, Rossetto is not at all interested in the technicalities of electroacoustic music: the sound processes she employs are simple and the recordings often have a rather raw quality. At first listen, this aspect may seem off-putting to those accustomed to thinking of electroacoustic music as an exposition of beautiful sounds rationally articulated according to measured forms, as tradition would have it. On the contrary, Pictures of the Warm South is striking for the immediacy with which it manages to convey the visceral nature of human experience in all its sometimes miserable, sometimes sublime contingencies. Listen, for example, to the track Pool Water, Salt Water, and the Water in Your Head, where seemingly unmotivated crying is juxtaposed with water-related situations, creating a painful and deeply sincere mental landscape.

Joshua Bonnetta – The Pines

(Shelter Press, 4 CDs)

Sound artist Joshua Bonnetta had the brilliant idea of installing bioacoustic microphones on a pine tree in a forest in New York State and recording continuously for a year. I am also working with microphones of this type and I recognise the technical challenge and commitment required to carry out a project of this kind. Bonnetta’s pine recordings are sensational, but there are too many to listen to them all: it would take more than another year. The tree’s timescale is incomprehensible to our ears because we live on two different temporal scales. Yet technical objects such as microphones allow us to transcend this limit, at least partially, projecting us towards non-human or at least post-phenomenological forms of listening, as I suggested in a previous post. Naturally, Bonnetta had to devise a method to condense an entire year into a digestible time format. The four CDs contain four hours of sound montages, one for each season of the year. The multiplicity of sonorous phenomena testifies how much life usually goes unheard. The Pines reminds us, not with words but with a powerful sonic witness, of the vital materiality that continues to exist beyond our discursive universe.

Webber/Morris Big Band – Unseparate

(Out of Your Head, CD or digital)

Saxophonist and flautist Anna Webber is undoubtedly my favourite jazz musician, because she writes music that contains many of the things I crave from contemporary avant-garde jazz: complex and unexpected rhythms, unusual arrangements, and unprecedented, extravagant harmonies. Together with Angela Morris, they have set up an incredible big band consisting mainly of wind instruments, which sounds less like a traditional big band and more like a chamber ensemble of partially improvised contemporary atonal music. I loved their previous album, Both Are True, released in 2020, and listened to it dozens of times, and now a follow-up has finally arrived. During the pandemic, Webber began to explore the possibilities of just intonation, an ancient method of instrument tuning that had been abandoned in recent centuries due to the numerous practical difficulties it entails, but which is increasingly being revived and expanded by contemporary artists with new paradigms of thought and new technical possibilities. The first four tracks on this album are an exploration of what can be done with just intonation, starting with simple harmonic textures and minimal pulsations and culminating in the magnificent theme of Metaphor. Unseparate demonstrates not only that it is possible to make music in just intonation with conventional instruments, but also that there is a wealth of undiscovered creative potential.

Hannah Frances – Nested in Tangles

(Fire Talk, vynil, CD, or digital)

Recorded in a small town in Vermont, Nested in Tangles is one of those albums where you can immediately hear how much care went into recording, arranging, and mixing every single element in the studio. When I played it for the first time, I was completely unprepared for the rush of serotonin and dopamine that would keep me glued to the speakers, in total adoration of the continuous succession of formally and timbrally perfect compositions. It is essentially an album of progressive folk music studded with rock and jazz influences, characterised by highly original yet typically American songwriting and a magnificent instrumental ensemble, in which the horn section stands out. If last year’s album Keeper of the Shepherd already seemed to point in this direction, with Nested in Tangles it is now clear that Hannah Frances is one of the most significant songwriters of our time, and that this album will remain highly enjoyable for many years to come.

There are many other releases that have struck me this year. You can find a more extensive list here. However, if you appreciate what I write and are interested in my thoughts, let me know and I will write more about other outstanding music in future posts.

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In my previous newsletter I hinted at the idea of field recording as a mean to reach unusual points of listening, with the aim of developing an affective practice that could tune our ears to the anthropocenic catastrophe we are in. Despite not being particularly compelled by photography as an art form, as it is spatially enclosed and frozen in a moment – the opposite of the sonorous, which is a function of time extending through space – I definitely sympathize with Brodbeck’s and De Barbuat’s early aesthetics, for the way in which they understand the camera as an hermeneutic mediator. Whereas I’ve been pondering on such mediation with respect to its epistemic effects – how technical artifacts stretch and expand the boundaries of the perceived world – Brodbeck insists instead on the idea of fabricating reality by constructing the image. He wants to “work with reality to see what can be built in image”.

In fact, the artistic path of Brodbeck and De Barbuat seems to have undertaken a gradual estrangement from traditional photography, moving towards an increasingly constructed image, to the point of their recent AI-generated cycle of works, Une Histoire Parallèle. They selected two hundred photos exemplifying the whole history of photography and then tried to replicate them by using Midjourney, a popular text-to-image generator. Instead of feeding the original images, they tried to get similar results just by describing them through textual prompts. The whole process is thus playing with the algorithm’s idiosyncracies: what it can properly represent as it has learned (or memorized) it from thousands of examples, what it cannot represent as it requires a nuanced reasoning to be shown coherently, what looks wrong as it reveals biases in the dataset.

Exploring references in generative algorithms that have been trained on vast (often vastly unauthorized) collections of cultural artifacts – being them photographs or sound recordings – is certainly a fertile space for new works of art. What impresses me in the artistic arc of Brodbeck and De Barbuat is that the process of increasingly fabricating the image has reached a point that could be called postphotographic. Even though deep learning image generators work thanks to millions of preexisting photographs, the act of prompting a text-to-image algorithm is not photography anymore.

No light is being sensed, no actual space portrayed.

There is no capture of the present.

The temporality of AI media is very strange as its moment of creation, its contingency, leaves no trace in the image. Indeed, generation happens somewhere somewhen, across complex assemblages of servers, machines, humans, and energy, in a way that also depends on the accumulated temporalities of training data. Yet, the generative act does not testify of a spacetime in which things manifest in a certain unique configuration. It requires a spatiotemporal configuration, distributed and partially unthinkable, but the content of the representation does not show that. Rather, it synthesizes an image (or a sound) only contingent in the sense that it refers to a possible contingency it is fabricating – but never happened – similarly but not equally to previous techniques of digital image rendering and digital sound synthesis. All media are technically constructed, fabricated, so what is the difference? I think AI-generated media is something more and maybe something else entirely. It can resemble a photograph, a video, or a recorded acoustic sound to the point that it can’t be distinguished from those medias. It looks and feels organic, undistinguishable from a documentary witness of something happened in the world, but it is not. It is “the representation of a representation”, as my friend and philosopher Errol Boon puts is, while we discuss it in Paris.

The implications are significant. This type of simulacra completely shortcircuits our epistemological and aesthetic groundings. Photographs and videos cannot be trusted anymore: what they depict might have never happened, not even on a movie set. Voices just lost their aura for the first time in history, becoming technically reproducible. A voice does not necessarily refer to a human being anymore. While this poses challenges for all sorts of fields, from law to history, and offers immense new artistic means, I wonder how it is going to affect the reception of previous media. Now that post-photographs can portray non-existent places and moments well beyond the old-school photo editing, can a photograph evoke that same sense of situatedness, of time being frozen in light, in the same way as before? Would a field recording still feel contingent and unique when we listen to it with the skepticism of a media world in which we constantly have to discriminate what is deepfake and what is not? Does it not change entirely how digital media is experienced, even the artworks that have been produced before this technology started to circulate?

I reflect on these questions as I walk in a supermarket. The background music, I am quite certain, is AI-generated.

While I was pondering these matters, I received a phone call from a theologist friend. He wanted to tell me that he had finally realized how significant the epistemological potential of listening is. After a lifetime of working with words and images, he understood that listening is able to reveal what is invisible and indescribable. The otherwise ineffable. When I listen to something, I do not yet know what it is, but I am already in relationship with it. Listening always implies a contact, a coexistence, even before I understand what or who I have in front of me. It reveals life, a term my friend uses with many overlapped meanings. His call made me think about the revelatory potential of listening in relation to Di Croce's urban practices.

From a post-phenomenological perspective, the microphone is not just a tool for recording sound, but a hermeneutic mediator – a device that not only amplifies sensory perception, but also produces new interpretations of the world. By bringing the insensible into the sphere of the audible, it actually produces new sensorial realities, which change the way we perceive, interpret, and think about the world. In the analysis of urban sound, the implications are numerous. Microphone listening makes the alien character of sound audible. Recording sound is a politically relevant act because it unveils the otherness between the embodied, phenomenological experience of listening and the post-phenomenological experience of technically mediated sound. The difference produced by the act of recording thus highlights a fundamental aspect of listening, as AM Kanngieser suggested:

Sound '[…] renders apparent that the world is not for humans. The world is rather with humans - a relation that is not without antagonism'.

Listening brings to consciousness a fundamental fact about the city: it is not only the home of the human. It is necessary to think of the city as a place of cohabitation between human, non-human, more-than-human collectives, as it is urgent to lay the foundations for a legislation of space that goes beyond the Anthropocene phase we are living through. One of the most problematic aspects of tackling climate change is the difficulty in making perceptible the myriad of changes that anthropic action is producing. Despite centuries of taxonomy, we still have not discovered most living species, some of which are becoming extinct as a consequence of our way of inhabiting the world. Listening, and in particular listening mediated by technical objects that extend its possibilities, is therefore a method of bringing into the sphere of the sensible everything that, because it is imperceptible in everyday life, cannot acquire subjectivity and citizenship in our politics. In this regard, Kathryn Yusoff has written that

'an understanding of the scope of the insensible dimensions of our material ecological arrangements is crucial if we are to create new practices of sensations and new sensibilities around such diffuse, recalcitrant, and dislocated issues as biodiversity loss, new forms of biotechnological life, and climate change'.

I wonder then how Di Croce's method can be extended to new ways of listening. What can we learn about a city by recording its waterways with hydrophones? What by burying microphones in the ground? By miking roofs? And why limit ourselves only to the city? Our daily actions are interconnected with a myriad of processes of transformation and transport of matter and energy that traverse the globe, the atmosphere, and even beyond it. The more the practice of field recordings is able to make these processes perceptible, the more it extends our ability to interpret the world and imagine other forms of cohabitation. Therefore, I thought I would like to mention some sound artists who, through unconventional recording techniques, have found new ways of making us experience matter and life.

Jana Winderen

Winderen's works are paradigmatic of the discourse I have addressed here. As written in her bio, 'her practice pays particular attention to audio environments and to creatures which are hard for humans to access, both physically and aurally – deep under water, inside ice or in frequency ranges inaudible to the human ear'. Her best-known works are probably The Noisiest Guys on the Planet (2009) and The Wanderer (2016), but I also recommend listening to the more recent piece The Art of Listening: Under Water (2019), where the conflict between anthropogenic activity and inhuman life comes out quite significantly.

Toshiya Tsunoda

Over the past three decades Toshiya Tsunoda has consistently devoted himself to finding alternative ways of listening to matter through matter itself. Tsunoda is always looking for new points of listening, either through transduction of solid objects or by using hollow objects as resonators. His recordings are usually not composed dramatically or in forms meant to be palatable to listeners – they are sound testimonies to an otherness that has no intention of coming to you so much as just being, manifesting itself in its mere sonic presence. What better way to approach the inhuman?

Annea Lockwood

Annea Lockwood's field recordings have been pioneering in the way they connect human community, life, and matter. Listen, for example, to A Sound Map of the Danube (2001-2004), in which recordings of the river from different locations are interspersed with interviews with communities that live in a close relationship with it. Listen to how the constant flow of the river relates to flocks, to the sounds of bells, to wild animals. All these things are also part of the river.

There would be many other important artists to discuss, but I am saving them for a future article, in which I would like to write in depth about the notion of soundscape. In the meantime, I have yet to digest the coherence with which, after reflecting on urban coexistence with other species, cockroaches took the opportunity given by my neighbors' negligence to invade the building and throw me out of my house.

Oren Ambarchi & Eric Thielemans – Kind Regards (2025, AD 93)

Australian guitarist Oren Ambarchi's foundational practice has always been collaborative improvisation. His expansive discography counts over seventy works with other artists, many of them released by his label Black Truffle Records. Here Ambarchi's signature guitar sounds – long, swirly filaments of harmony that rarely resemble the sonic morphology of a guitar – encounter the delicate and detailed drumming of Eric Thielemans, a Belgian drummer with an evident jazz background. Kind Regards indulges in textural subtleties, it is patiently disciplined in its unfolding, exhibiting a degree of concentration and mutual understanding in the formal development of the improvisation that is very hard to find in a live album. Let it slowly seep into your listening room until it fills all the space with its brightness.

Sylvie Courvoisier & Mary Halvorson – Bone Bells (2025, Pyroclastic)

Bone Bells is the third collaboration between pianist Sylvie Courvoisier and guitarist Mary Halvorson. It is by far the most impressive work of the duo and it's been playing on repeat in my study room since it came out last month. Courvoisier is an eclectic pianist, whose influences combine modern classical and chamber jazz; Halvorson is possibly one of the most interesting band leaders in the contemporary jazz scene. In Bone Bells they have finally reached an outstanding, cohesive interplay, while also writing eight pieces that fully embody a distinct sound. It is skeletal and creepy at times, but never too dark; intricate and labyrinthine, but always playful.

Haswell / Hecker – UPIC Diffusion Session #23 (2025, Mego)

Russel Haswell and Florian Hecker have both been long-time ambassadors of noise music, although with different approaches. Whereas Haswell tends to be more intuitive and physical in its relationship with electronic media, often dealing with analogue electronics in a very performative fashion, Hecker is the author of the most cerebral and dizzying extreme computer music, including a 53-hours-long hallucinatory piece of algorithmic sound reconstruction. UPIC Diffusion Session #23 is just a small add to their collaborative output playing with the UPIC synthesis system designed by Iannis Xenakis in 1977. UPIC has pioneered a visual approach to sound synthesis, allowing artists to draw waveforms and sound processes. Here Haswell and Hecker engage with it employing metaphorical relationships – feeding the system with sketches of "disasters and atrocities" – which inevitably get lost in translation and end up bringing somewhere else. What is this somewhere else? It's up to you to figure it out.

Charlemagne Palestine & Seppe Gebruers – Beyondddddd the Notessssss (2025, Konnekt)

Since his 1976 minimalist masterpiece Strumming Music, Charlemagne Palestine's music has been consistently characterized by hypnotizing piano pieces that would indefinitely expand time through swarms of notes and long resonances. Beyondddddd the Notessssss is not different, although this time Palestine has found a great companion in Seppe Gebruers. They play four different pianos, two of them detuned by a quarter tone, wallowing in dense accumulations that almost induce vertigo. It feels to me like a playful, improvisational counterpart to the sublime, hypnotizing spirals of the microtonal works of post-spectralist composer Georg Friedrich Haas.

Sarah Belle Reid & Vinny Golia – Accidental Ornithology (2025, Infrequent Seams)

Mimesis of bird songs by means of wind instruments is a recurring theme in music – take for instance Olivier Messian's Catalogue d'Oiseaux, John Luther Adam's Songbirdsongs, and Luigi Ceccarelli's compelling electroacoustic piece for amplified bass clarinet Birds. Accidental Ornithology is a fine addition to this ever-expanding repertoire, in which Sarah Belle Reid and Vinny Golia play with a wide variety of instruments and self-built digital sound processors that distort and granulate wind gestures (some of which, interestingly, remind me of the gesture-controlled spectral granulator I built for my performance Gesturalia back in 2021).

Vijay Iyer & Wadada Leo Smith – Defiant Life (2025, ECM)

I've been waiting for a return of the duo Iyer + Smith since their 2016 album A Cosmic Rhythm With Each Stroke, a work that I've profoundly appreciated. In late March they finally came back with a new release that more or less follows the same trajectory of their first encounter: deep, lamenting, meditative, even mournful modern creative, avant-jazz duets that take all their time to build up, constantly surprising you with their clever harmonic language. In this setting Iyer leaves his piano untouched in many sections and plays with elusive electronic textures, while Smith intones its soulfully mysterious melodies. If you haven't explored Wadada Leo Smith's impressive discographic output, I strongly suggest to immerse yourself in the listening – he is the most impressive trumpeter I've ever heard.

Arve Henriksen & Robert Jürjendal – Haihara (2025, Smalltown Supersound)

Speaking of inventive trumpeters, Arve Henriken's new collaborative effort with Robert Jürjendal must be mentioned. Henriksen's chiaroscuro style, characterized by expressive electroacoustic processing and strong melodic themes, meets the guitar and electronic loops of Jürjendal, creating a pure fourth world record. Haihara exhibits an impressive variety of musical solutions to the duo setting, ranging from ambient bliss to gamelan-like passages, and even including an intruguing "Baltic Bolero".

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