IT SEEMS VAGUELY IMPLAUSIBLE that a band as important as Still House Plants started playing out in 2015 and is only just making their American debut this Thursday and Friday, at Shift/411 Kent in Brooklyn, in collaboration with Blank Forms. That’s eight years that we haven’t been able to see them ribbon the fabric of time with guitar, drums, voice—and nothing else. They started in the mid-2010s at the Glasgow School of Art and slowly made their way to London, releasing singles and cassettes and one-offs that are now hard to find (or at least impossible to buy). After a long pause during the

A FEW YEARS AGO, while flipping through the new arrivals crate at Nice Price Records in Raleigh, North Carolina, where I was visiting family over the holidays, I became transfixed by what I heard playing on the store’s stereo system. It was immediately recognizable as Christmas music: A jubilant, resonant male baritone implored the listener to “let me hang my mistletoe over your head / and let me love you.” But the voice, landing somewhere between the velvet burliness of Teddy Pendergrass and the genteel phrasing of Lou Rawls, like the lustrous production and extravagant, modern R&B arrangement,

“WHAT CAN A BODY DO?” Gilles Deleuze names this as the central question of Baruch Spinoza’s Ethics, which places the body at the center of a philosophy of expression. The inquiry was motivated in part by Spinoza’s commitment to radical contingency—Deleuze goes on to suggest that “We do not even know of what a body is capable”—but it’s a question that feels broadly in tune with the artistic form known as sound poetry, which harnesses human vocality to newly expressive ends. Taken up throughout much of the twentieth century, with precedents dating as far back as humankind has been mouthing syllables,

FOR PIANIST IGOR LEVIT, music always opens out onto a social context. In 2020, when the pandemic temporarily shut down concert life, he put on a series of hauskonzertes livestreamed from his flat. These were models of what a classical concert could be: intimate, accessible, with an ear to the music of leftist composers such as Cardew, Dessau, and Rzewski alongside canonical repertoire. Levit’s latest release likewise reclaims a strain of dissidence within and against the tradition, pairing pieces by Liszt, Wagner, and Mahler with the late Hans Werner Henze’s piano concerto Tristan, a work written

WE MUST FORGIVE OTHERS for the terrible things they do, especially when love takes them to the brink. If you have never heard the first Neu! album, you might find yourself babbling about this music. “It’s so peaceful and alive, and it’s noisy but in this benevolent way, and all of these things happen even though it’s mostly just drums and guitar,” and then you get so excited you say, “This is real Krautrock,” even though you’re not sure you should be using that phrase, but you’ve heard other people say it, and what are you even comparing it to? And then you call the drumming “motorik” because

IMPROVISATION, says ordinary wisdom, happens in a particular time and place. A player lays down a melody, a rhythm. Another responds. The isolation of the pandemic, coupled with our digital age in which musicians can share files with each other instantly, has forced even stubborn traditionalists to expand their rigid understandings and embrace improvised music layered with overdubs and other studio tricks. Australian guitarist, drummer, and pioneering composer Oren Ambarchi predicted this shift by two decades. The fifty-three-year-old tours relentlessly, accompanied by a who’s who of contemporary

IT’S HARD TO SUM UP the rich and varied Bay Area new music scene. It could be time to cite some of the many artists deserving wider attention like electronic musicians/voice shamans Alexandra Buschman and Danishta Rivero Castro (and their band, Las Soucias), or percussion wizard Karen Stackpole. I could highlight the behind-the-scenes organizing work of Rent Romus, a composer/improviser and saxophonist who somehow finds the time to run two series—the Luggage Store New Music Series (the longest running creative music series in the Bay), and the SIMM Series at the Musician’s Union Hall—his label

THE BRITISH IMPROVISING GROUP AMM has had an impact as mysterious as it is evident on the world of experimental music. Formed in the mid-’60s by what founding member Keith Rowe called a group of “skinny white European street kids” influenced by African American free jazz, AMM grew out of series of workshops at London’s Royal College of Art, its early performances attended by the likes of Ornette Coleman, Paul McCartney, and Syd Barrett. Rowe, a musician and painter who’d played in Mike Westbrook’s big band, turned his guitar flat as Jackson Pollock had laid flat his canvas and also sneaked in

BEST KNOWN in the art world for his otherworldly soundtracks to the neofabulist videos of Shuang Li, American-born artist and musician Eli Osheyack is more recognized in his adopted hometown of Shanghai for his live sets at ALL Club, where, under his last name, he churned out an intergenre fusion of gabber, synthwave, drone, ambient, techno, and trap that helped place the city on the map for experimental electronic dance music. His latest album, Intimate Publics (SVBKVLT, 2022), can be seen as both a reflection on the quintessential Shanghai sound he has cultivated over the past decade alongside

LITTLE ELSE COMPARES to the music of Québécois composer Claude Vivier. His work offers, in the words of composer-conductor Matthias Pintscher, “great brilliance, great severity, great archaism, great emotions”: glimpses of other worlds firmly rooted in our own. Though he was admired by leading composers such as György Ligeti, Gérard Grisey, and Louis Andriessen, Vivier, who was murdered in 1983 at the age of thirty-four, remains regrettably obscure. A three-day Vivier festival at London’s Southbank Centre earlier this month offered a welcome opportunity to redress the balance.

For the opening

BEGINNING IN THE FIRST CENTURY BCE, natural pearl diving was the economic, social, and cultural backbone of the Persian Gulf. Well into the 1930s, over 100,000 men—enslaved Africans, indentured workers, and career divers from Bahrain, Kuwait, and Qatar—still took to the sea each season, diving hundreds of times a day to the oyster beds, only 1 percent of which would produce a pearl. It was exhausting and perilous work descending twenty fathoms down to the seafloor, and music lifted their spirits. Nahma: A Gulf Polyphony, the latest transmedia compilation from FLEE, explores the histories that

COMPOSER MICHAEL FINNISSY’S CAREER has been a lifelong rejection of the divisions drawn up in and around the world of classical music. Growing up in London in the 1960s, Finnissy did not pursue academic training in composition until the age of eighteen, and was influenced as much by Hockney, Rauschenberg, Ginsberg, Genet, and Godard as by the wide range of music that he absorbed from public libraries, from family and friends, and from the radio. In the years since, his large body of compositions has referenced folk, jazz, spirituals, and the European avant-garde, his approach to music at once