by Rick Weaver (@rickjweaver1)
Simple routine at Astral Spirits. Release showpiece after showpiece of contemporary free jazz and its intersections - e.g. experimental, electroacoustic, non-idiomatic, noise, no rock, avant jazz, and improv. Sheathe the sharp-eared music in striking wrap. Announce the heavy hitters in throwback Cooper Black font. Frame off the curls, peels and wedges of cover art designer Jaime Zuverza's sedative objects. Lure collectors.
"I want people to want to buy everything because it fits together, it looks the same, it's pretty. I want them to...not really subversively...the underlying idea is that then they’ll listen to all this stuff, a lot of which they otherwise wouldn’t," Nate Cross, founder of Astral Spirits, tells me in March 2019 from across a picnic table on the back patio of Dive Bar, two blocks or so from SXSW Center, where he just clocked out as production coordinator.
Fitting together pieces of intangible art (i.e. music) is, perhaps, impossible and needless, but Cross attempts to make that task easier. Voicing newsletters, one sheets, and on-liner notes with affability, his pitch could put prospectors at ease, something the music cannot always accomplish.
When he releases a new batch of sounds into the market, Cross plays the guessing game: which album will attract the most attention from public and press? To date, he hasn't guessed right. Any attention, applause or neglect, disappoints Cross. “I’m not trying to willfully be obscure, just trying to put stuff out I like. I’m still doing all the press myself. I can’t really afford to hire someone. Every record I’ve put out deserves more praise than it gets,” he says.
Still, caterers dishing out plates of abstractions can't expect diners to leave room for every ephemeral object harvested from the bounty of sound. By the time a collector has digested the 100-plus titles in Astral Spirits' nutrient rich catalog, another five trillion notes - as if they grow on trees - will have probably been blown from every direction into microphones. Treading through the muck of endless motivic development, turned heads, false starts, full stops, improvisations, deviations, variations, indulgences and excesses sounds overwhelming. Not for Cross, who not only seems to find the time to listen to every note - as employee for the glutted SXSW festival and labelhead of the precise Astral Spirits - but seems invigorated by it. "I've always been a collector," he admits. Where Astral Spirits is concerned, he proves himself a fine-tuned listener and hard-eared critic. Not a bum note in the six years since Cross launched Astral Spirits.
His affirmative way of being is anomalous in the bloodsport of jazz, and the larger music business, where egotripping and infighting can outshine the music. More enthusiastic than iconoclastic, Cross wonders, “There was always the fight between European free jazz and American free jazz, but why does it matter? You can learn from each other.”
Rather than subdivide, he extends the area code, to the degree a one-man-show small-scale limited-press single-family-home part-time independent underground niche-genre record label in a dysfunctional industry lost in an attention economy can. But Cross plays the long game too, dealing variable long plays from invaluable players, legendary and unsung, their instruments tuned to resonate for decades. Under one big sky, Astral Spirits synthetically gathers singular players from D.C. to New Zealand, from Cleveland to Spain, from Chicago to Texas, all of whom move sound forward through their own means and methodologies.
"It's a positive thing. You’re creating these wider swaths of what a genre is," he says. "I guess I hadn’t really thought of that way before, but I do kind of hope that’s what Astral Spirits does. The idea...not taking away genre entirely...but widening the definitions of things is important because it becomes more inclusive."
TEMPLO DEL SONIDO
Sometimes you have to nudge the hand of fate to widen those definitions. While watching Lamont Thomas bona fide free drum with rust belt no wave legends X___X, Cross got the notion to ask Thomas to make a crossover record. Can see the marquee now: Rock musician makes free jazz album, a gimmick worthy of William Castle. Though typecast as a rock drummer, Thomas - who groups his solo-oriented work under the name Obnox - is adept at bending, melding and merging any and all music to weld amalgamations with explosive depth and electricity. His result, Templo del Sonido, transcends the gimmick, just as the majority of his work bypasses the limitations of genre. A crossover album in the right hands, it proves the clearer the lines, the more elusive the boundaries.
“There's no need to try to pinpoint a genre, no need to try to fucking nail down what's going through a motherfucker’s mind,” Thomas says over the phone from Cleveland. “The people that can map it out and explain every little nook and cranny like it's the invention of the wheel or some shit, I don’t know about those cats. I'm too busy. I'm too busy playing. Too busy trying to turn a phrase. I'm too busy trying to get the beat to fucking snap somebody's neck, you dig?"
“People don't understand Black music as it stands," he continues. "The last thing we need is some egghead English major telling us what Black folks are playing right now. It’s been the same for years, and then some dude dies penniless and broke, and they say, ‘He was a genius and he was worth this and he was worth that.’ Or, shit, now, ‘Fuck Michael Jackson’ and 'he's not worth shit,’ you know what I mean? It's like, ‘Okay. We'll take your word for it motherfucker'...I mean, fuck, what do we really know about this shit?”
First day of tracking at Whoa Mack Studios. Time to set the spine for the temple of sound, drums as the backbone. Thomas is joined by bassist Leland Cain. They lay it as they play onto half-inch sixteen-track tape in a living room in Cleveland. The living room is the makeshift studio of audio engineer Paul Maccarrone, who relocated his professional studio, Zombie Proof, into his homestead, now furnished with mixing boards and instrument cables. While Maccarrone tests levels, Cain warms up his upright. His preliminary bowing is striking enough that Thomas makes it the opener to Templo; "Stagger Lee Cain" strings the name of the folkloric St. Louis gambler who blew that poor boy down over a Stetson with the classically-trained, unfeigned Leland Cain. Clocking in at barely over a minute, it's a palate cleanser between whatever was happening before the needle dropped and whatever will happen after the brief but buxom track ends. This meditative moment is betrayed by the rest of Templo del Sonido, which blows the hair back and leans into the red with supergravitational pressure, density and pulse. The sort of thing you turn up louder the longer you listen, until you're surrounded by a cascade of magnificent overdrive.
Next day, the rest of the guests - bandmates, friends and co-workers at custom guitar pedal shop EarthQuaker Devices (80 mile commute to Akron and back for Thomas) - show up to fix improvisational skin via licks, lyrics, reeds, riffs, strums, shreds and first takes onto last night's vertebrae. Tape loops and synths orbit around a nucleus of guitars - including the touch-heavy tap-happy Warr guitar played by Morgan Phelps - that warble and surge over cymbalist shake and echo-submerged vocals. Thomas adds a second coat of rhythm guitar, vocals and tambourine onto the spontaneous canvas. "I started out as a drummer. I love drums, beats. I love the backbeat side of it all," he says. "Everything is painted on top of that. That's how I start my records anyway. Everything else is just, you know, a vocal harmony, is just more melody. But in most cases I’m beating a guitar like a rhythm device."
Laissez-faire as bandleader, the chaotic majesty he conducts is built on trust. “They know I want to Black it up. I want it to bump. I want it to boom,” Thomas says of his cohorts. “They bring all those qualities in and on the fly. Not sitting around, rehearsing, talking and all this shit. Just get it down. Let's play. I trust you. You trust me. Let's trust that this is going to be dope.” With enough breathing room to span and lift, the players oxygenate the expansive atmo of Templo del Sonido, while poet Kisha Nicole Foster grounds it on "Names" with words against the systematic violence of systemic racism in crooked America.
Third and final day, Thomas and Maccarrone mix the tape down. Temple doors shut.
"It's my version of improvising. I can't read a real book or a fake book or something like that, but I can get into a mood that people can react to. And we can make some good, natural music that way. You know, it's not really that deep. I'm not an egghead about this shit," he says. "A lot of dudes spend time practicing to get to a level of musicianship that they think is acceptable, then go and pursue their dreams. I try it all right then. If it feels good I keep doing it. If that's learning a new skill or whatever, you know, cool...but I don't...I have to work. I got to take care of my kid. I got to write. I got to record. Some people get into the shred of it all, whereas I’m more into the material - front to finish - an album, an entire album. Not just a little single I can just pop up on Bandcamp for the clicks or the frequency, because I'm going on tour or something like that. I'm really trying to make whole albums that'll sit in your collection for 20-30 years and you’ll never want to get rid of them.”
FROM THE LAND OF THE WICKED KING
At Hotel Vegas on November 23, 2019, after a couple of minutes of kicking against the amp buzz, Thomas maneuvered the guitar into ecstatic psychoactive turbulence, swirling the room, vortices in the wake. That show was the second night in a celebration that marked the end of Monofonus Press, a significant notch in the timeline of Astral Spirits. In 2013, Cross first approached Morgan Coy, founder of Monofonus, for help, financial and otherwise. They became sister labels and spirit animals, to a degree inseparable and indistinguishable. Virtually every album cover prior to November 2019 was stamped like a passport to the stars with the insignias of both imprints.
Though labelwork tends to be heavy on pushing pencils and signing forms, it's not entirely immune to creative gesture. A cooperative miracle - like improvisation - when resolute labels with strict aesthetics - like musicians - can compromise. “Improv is such a fraction of what people listen to, it’s such a niche, there’s no reason to be fighting or comparing yourself to other labels. We’re all just trying to connect the pieces,” Cross says. In addition to Monofonus Press, Astral Spirits has split the overhead with Feeding Tube (Massachusetts), Family Vineyard (Missouri), Spacetone Recordings (Chicago) and God in the Music (New Zealand).
"Managing the beast can be a bit of a nightmare at times, but any musician has extra hats to wear," emails Noel Meek, improviser, music journalist and founder of End of an Alphabet and God in the Music, the latter of which he started "specifically so collaborating with Nate would make more sense," Meek writes.
In the liberated realm of relative obscurity, free to roam outside the prison gates of mass media, creators moonlight as critics and curators, vice versa. Difficult to delineate roles and meaningless to try. But to what degree is pressing records the same as making music?
"Collaboration is important to me. I’m all about the collectivism. I’m a recovering Marxist and still have all those socialist ideals about working together for the greater good. So, in that way, collaborating with a label is exactly the same as working with another musician – collective work for a greater goal.
"Practically though, there’s little they have in common. Music is an intuitive thing for me; it’s an area where my conscious brain is switched well off (that’s what I aim for anyway). Working with a label is all paperwork and emails – it’s the workaday part of the brain. Which is a good thing – you can’t be in either state too long each day," he writes.
On From the Land of the Wicked King, a title which likely addresses the orange elephant in the room, Meek's burly electronics rattle under Arrington de Dionyso's pearly saxophone and Rodrigo Rico's prudent drums. Leaning on the toms and leaving cymbals be, Rico etches rivets into the groove, wide enough for Dionyso's slowly rotating motifs and Meek's wild, rumbling toggles.
Music to get lost in without much of a backstory. Three musicians, from Mexico, New Zealand and the Pacific Northwest, play live in Seattle, one night only. Perhaps the most remarkable aspect, aside from the music, is how unobtrusive physical distance seems to be in bringing these three musicians together for a brief moment in time. Not that distance isn't inherently surmountable - for Meek, geography can prove to be an obstacle.
"As a New Zealander, distance and isolation are always problems. We’re a byword for the furthest place from anywhere to most people in the world (if they can even find us on a map)," Meek writes. "Our youth and isolation have their advantages though – we’ve developed so much that is unique over here because of our isolation. I can’t imagine what it’d be like to live somewhere like New York or London and have all that fucking history weighing on you – I come from somewhere where it feels very free of that kind of weight. That’s our big advantage – we give the world scene something they won’t hear elsewhere. Having said that that, I fucking love getting out and mixing up with other musicians and artists and all overseas, as well as bringing them over here when I can," he writes. "Next trip over with any luck I’ll actually make it to Austin to meet Nate."
No, Nate Cross hasn't met the majority of the artists featured on the label. He's heard their music, however, perhaps a more direct line toward intimacy and alliance. When face to face is as impractical as it is unlikely, the clear connection is sound. Digital communication facilitates that connection. Many record labels mandate a no demo policy. Not Astral Spirits. Cross listens to every track that hits his inbox - from luminaries and newcomers, old friends and cold calls.
PHONOTYPIC PLASTICITY
Phonotypic Plasticity is one such cold call. Roughly a decade in the works, it shapes interaural space into cinematic confusion that blurs the mouthpiece with the mystery. The friendship - music and personal - between Pierce Warnecke and Louis Laurain dates about twice as long. At age 13, Warnecke's parents relocated to France on impulse. By chance, their next door neighbors were the Laurain family.
"We first started our collaboration using much more open forms and open material, trying to stay as 'free' as possible. But we noticed quickly that freedoms for one person can easily translate to restrictions for the other," Warnecke writes via email.
As teenagers, they dabbled briefly in ska-punk, recordings since erased. Since then, they've expanded their individual repertoires significantly, from big band and digital arts to improvised music and the indescribable. No longer neighbors, they remain neighborly. As a duo, they simmer and strike, knowing when to pounce and when to ponder.
"Since we tend to take our time, much of our work together starts from discussions about ideas we want to explore, followed by a phase of experimenting to see if the concepts work when played. I'd say that while we both present individual ideas, all of them end up getting bounced back and forth and being reworked to some extent. So our individual ideas usually work towards whatever the central composition principle is (for example trying to create confusion between acoustic and electronic sound sources)," Warnecke writes.
The album title plays off the concept of phentoypic plasticity, which is "basically life's capacity to adapt to new environments on the genetic level (I assume for better survival) through small iterative changes at each repetition," Warnecke explains. "So for us the idea was to set up a few starting points from which we allowed ourselves a little bit of deviation to mutate sounds and structures without going too far from the original idea."
Imagine a lens with the capability of both an optical telescope and an electron microscope, able to capture that range within minutes, seconds. As intuitive as it calculated in its articulation of disorientation, the therapeutically disruptive Phonotypic Plasticity runs less like a clinical trial and more like an amusement park ride designed by Ursula K. Le Guin. The funhouse of spatalization was recorded by Wilfried Wendling at La Muse en circuit over the course of a few days in November 2016, then edited later.
"We wanted to work with an idea of scale of sounds, to give the impression to zoom way in and out of a sound. We used a series of microphones placed all over the larger room at La Muse, in addition to digital [and] convolution reverbs to play on sounds jumping from super far away to super dry and close," Warnecke writes.
As a phenomena of sound, Phonotypic remains largely unidentified, unintentionally esoteric, widely unheard. "I thought more people would be like, 'Holy fuck,'" Cross tells me. "Not that it hasn’t done well, it just hasn’t got the response I hoped it would. In this digital world, that’s kind of been it. There’s not really a big story, which is kind of weird to me. Sent them their copies, exchanged thanks. But because there hasn’t been the same response as the Sandy Ewen and Lisa Cameron album, made me a little sad."
SEE CREATURES
In these days of geographic dislocation, a record label doesn't have to be somewhere. "I’ve been very purposeful about - I’m from Austin, the label’s in Austin – but it’s not an Austin-based label,” Cross says. If anywhere, he's got a crick in his neck for Chicago, where a generous slice of the label’s roster resides, and where he once resided himself. He lists and lauds established venues in Chicago that cater to live improvised music - Elastic Arts, Constellation and Slate - while daydreaming of the same proliferation for the capitol of Texas. When his gaze shifts back to Austin and Texas, however, he doesn't miss the trees for the forest - Ingebrigt Håker Flaten, Rob Mazurek, claire rousay, Tom Carter, Shit & Shine, More Eaze, to name a few.
To name a couple more, Sandy Ewen (Houston born) and Lisa Cameron (Austin). Their exotic See Creatures is a non-directional aquarium of friction, feedback and photophoric grind; an active painting of visual sound that favors texture over linearity; a structure for immersion.
"Riftia Pachyptila.” “Melanocetis Jouhson.” “Rhinochimera Atlantica.” Piranha-teethed tracks dredge up cosmic sediment, dumped onto the docks and crunched under feet into invocations capable of activating the pineal gland. “We named it See Creatures, referring to the soundscape that we made as being from another world,” says Cameron, using speech-to-text. “We were the creatures that were seeing this other world, describing it with the sounds that we made.”
Ewen's guitar style is as topographically varied as Houston is flat. She adds found objects - maybe a railroad spike, a steel dish scrubber, a threaded screw - to often agitate all six strings simultaneously, sending the abrasive sculptures to dual amplifiers, while Cameron plays a snare drum, lap steel guitar and a berimbauphone, her invention.
"It's basically an idiophone, which is a stringed instrument with a resonator. In jug bands they would call it a gutbucket bass. Very simple, just a box with a stick on top and a string going from the stick to the box. In this case, the stick is from a Brazilian instrument called the berimbau, used frequently as a rhythmic instrument for a martial art called capoeira, but also used by shamans to create visions. I have used a berimbau to create visions for many years, starting in the late '70s," she says. "The feedback comes from placing various contact mics on the instrument with clamps, and then running those through a mixer. I found that easing or applying pressure to the clamps created variations in sound. Also putting different weights on the box would cause fluctuations in tones."
Fascinated by feedback ever since she heard Jimi Hendrix's "UFO" as a child, Cameron captains it into firmament. "I'd say that my music has a strong spiritual base to it, and that I do use sounds to go to other planes," Cameron says. "I'm very much interested in African, Latin, and Asian traditional music and the way that those sounds encourage trance states and astral traveling. And also by experimental composers and free jazz musicians such as Sun Ra, Albert Ayler and Cecil Taylor, whom I dedicated See Creatures to."
Before the session in Hill Country, Ewen and Cameron had already waltzed across Texas for years, from the Church of the Friendly Ghost to the all-female festival Lady Friends. The afternoon of See Creatures, sans discussion, they set up in audio engineer Cherryjet's living room and played a little over an hour total, breaking once.
"Four hours later we were finished," Cameron says. "One of the things I really like about improvising with people is that you never know what you're going to do, or even what you did until much later. I do remember it was a pleasant sunny day in the Hill Country, and we both felt good about the session."
WORKS FOR UPRIGHT BASS AND AMPLIFIER
If any musician, to borrow from Meek, "has extra hats to wear," it's Luke Stewart. He divides his time, for example, as a radio DJ, curator, music journalist, lecturer, listener, multi-instrumentalist (including bass, no-input mixer, and his first instrument, saxophone). Stewart travels into a variety of multi-disciplinary and musical expeditions, including Blacks' Myths, Irreversible Entanglements, Heroes are Gang Leaders, Heart of the Ghost and Six Six.
“I’ve always been that guy that likes to investigate all sides of music,” Luke Stewart says over the phone in March 2019 while driving up to NY from DC, two cities he oscillates between. “As a listener, as a member of the community, you can achieve a certain level of mastery in the music just with your ears.”
His many-sided Works for Upright Bass and Amplifier is an examination of the abstract, a living document of an unfolding process that breathes discovery. At first, though, necessity birthed the notion that developed into Works. Drowned out by drummers, Luke Stewart cranked the volume up for audibility's sake. He took it solo, and after a series of live performances, Stewart stitched the standout moments into a seamless sequence of vignettes recorded by Mattson Ogg.
The sequence is a carousel of resonance. Degrees climb and drop, in relation to movement and position, control and circumstance, call and response, harmony and discord. In the airspace between composition and improvisation, Stewart juggles bass and amplifier, allowing them to interplay at the edge of feedback on their own terms.
"It's possible to reach people with just energy, with spiritual energy, in the medium of sound. There's a way to communicate to specific audiences and specific people just through the vibrations, in the sound," he says over the phone in March, one year later, in the uncertainty of the looming pandemic. "One of the names of my performances in the Upright Bass and Amplifier is 'Live is the Medium.' The purpose of that is to bring home the fact that in order to feel and to receive the full brunt and life-changing power of sound is obviously being able to experience it. That then comes with complications, that involve all sorts of factors, from all sorts of different variables."
Videographer Pat Cain has accompanied Stewart on "Live is the Medium," the subset within the sprawl of Works. Dancer Miriam Parker has joined Stewart on other occasions, as has cellist Leila Bordreuil. Stewart has notated the work for a feedback ensemble and transposed it for other instruments. More of continuation than a sequel, Stewart is currently in post-production with a second Works, again recorded by Mattson Ogg, as well as a new series of videos with Pat Cain. Even the most stable elements, upright bass and amplifier, fluctuate. One evening, his instrument in disrepair, Stewart borrowed a bass with two pick-ups, thereby pluralizing the amplifiers in the piece's title. A longform place, Works offers changes in angles, augmentations of nuance, viewports into a sea of discovery and longevity.
"It's really just working on telepathy, in general, which I believe is possible through sound, through instruments, through nonverbal sounds. There's a way of communicating both abstract and specific messages through just sound. These are things I've experienced personally. Where people have come up to me after performances, saying the sound I was making made them feel a certain kind of way. And that would match the way I was trying to portray the music, without having said a word," Stewart says.
"The message being transmitted: It's a real historical meditation on the concept of history," he elaborates, referencing Blacks' Myths, his duo with drummer Warren "Trae" Crudup III. "And yes, taking a nod from Sun Ra, and some of the things he said, about the mystery, about mythology, and about how history is just a learned cultural acceptance of what the past is. So when you have a people whose past has been taken from them, then you're left with a mystery, with a mythology, which then can be molded, and reexamined. History can be reexamined to create a powerful identity.
"And you can see, especially yourself in Texas, how certain people have done that, within the conversations around the Civil War or Reconstruction, post-slavery, all these things, where people are trying to recontextualize this history for their own ends. And they're using that to justify their racism, to justify their prejudice.
"But you can also use that to justify your existence as an altered being. You can use that as a tool for self-empowerment. And the reason why this is happening, is because we really don't know what happened back then. People can take things that happened that they themselves have not experienced, that someone else has told them, and recontextualize that. In a certain sense, all history is mythology. History is nothing but a present day reexamination of things that people have told us about, and how we feel about it in today's context. So just like those fucking crazy rednecks or whatever, have been recontextualizing what the meaning and purpose of the Civil War was, you can also recontextualize the entire mystery of the past and use that for empowerment and change as an inspiration for all of these things."
What happens to sound on the way from musician to listener, in the noise in-between?
"When I say that 'Live is the Medium,' well then what am I talking about? There are all kinds of contexts for a live show, right? Especially now, in this heightened corporate environment where the Live Nations, the fucking, you know, various corporate conglomerations that are creeping in and dominating, certainly, the mainstream and gained lots of in-roads to the underground community of musical performance. It's a challenge. It's a real feat of navigation.
"I guess my approach to it is that the context of however many, as many people we can reach as possible, because...just in real practical terms, until a musician or artist, or whatever, reaches a certain platform, there's only so much you can do in order to control the context of your music. And that's also like one of the most important things for an artist to do - to control the narrative, to control the context as much as possible. But you also have to realize there's only so far you can go because people are going to think things, write things, perceive you in ways that you can't control. And that's just some in general life shit.
"So, in working with that as much as possible, I think the only thing you can do is really just focus on the music, and making the music itself as effective as possible," Stewart says.
A RECORD OF EVERYTHING
Cross got hooked on improv in the '90s, when his roommate at Indiana University in Bloomington urged him to attend a concert featuring German reeds-player Peter Brötzmann. Years later in Austin, when Cross was about to become a part-time employee and a stay-at-home father, the timing felt right to start Astral Spirits.
“I have always liked labels. The idea came about when I started getting into improv music, even though I couldn’t play it. I’m just not good enough to play it,” says Cross, an accomplished noise rock bassist, keyboardist, guitarist and trombonist in his own right. “So, I wanted to be a part of this scene that I thought was great, and it just kind of grew from that.”
Though he’s front and forward when he plugs in with brown acid bands like USA/Mexico, Cross seems more at ease in the background. In addition to smoothing out kinks at SXSW, he has quietly supported avant garde festivals and programs, like San Antonio’s Contemporary Whatever, Austin’s Sonic Transmissions, and Marfa’s Desert Encrypts, with small donations. "A lot of the things that I like to do, and even my day job, I like doing things that people don’t really care what you do, unless you mess something up or they really want to dig in...being a behind-the-scenes person," he says. "I just really love music itself, honestly. Sounds cheesy. I just want people to hear this stuff. And mostly I want people who aren’t the same old white dudes who are complaining about digital releases. I want some different people who aren’t those people, I want young people to listen to music, to jazz."
Happy hour is over. Cross has stayed on the patio longer than he intended. His enthusiasm increases, minute by minute, draft by draft, as he pulls out records, cds and tapes out of a cardboard box like an amateur magician eager to share new tricks. In a mere six years in, he's built the Astral Spirits catalog almost entirely of, to quote Lamont Thomas, "whole albums that'll sit in your collection for 20-30 years." (Even the more ephemeral actions and fast-acting elixirs leave a long-lasting aftertaste.) Time loses meaning when we're talking sound with substance. The arranged imaginations of Dustin Laurenzi's Snaketime: The Music of Moondog. The exhumed vibrations of Brandon Lopez' quoniam facta sum vilis. The flexible spectres of Charles Barabé's De la fragilité. The halfspeed rumble of Black Spirituals' Black Tape. The entrenched hallucinations of Rob Mazurek' Chimeric Stoned Horn. The gleeful detonations of Crazy Doberman's Illusory Expansion. The aerated roundabouts of Ka Baird and Muyassar Kurdi's Voice Games. The percussive skewers of Burton Green, Damon Smith and Ra Kalam Bob Moses' Life's Intense Mystery. The warm patience of Tetuzi Akiyama, Nicolas Field and Gregor Vidic's Interpersonal Subjectivities. The equivocal luster of Susan Alcorn, Joe McPhee and Ken Vandermark's Invitation to a Dream. The glassine cycles of Christian Rønn and Aram Shelton's Multiring. The transverse-cracked thruways of Hearts & Minds' Hearts & Minds. The healing constellation of Hamid Drake and Mako Sica's Balancing Tear. The opaque granary of Laniakea by Ilia Belorukov & Vasco Trilla. Works for Upright Bass and Amplifier. See Creatures. Phonotypic Plasticity. From the Land of the Wicked King. Templo del Sonido.
“I’d like to put out a record of everything,” Cross says.
Astral Spirits Mix Playlist
1. Christian Rønn & Aram Shelton - "Crawl" [00:00]
2. Amirtha Kidambi & Lea Bertucci - "Hysteric Arch" [06:49]
3. Burton Greene / Damon Smith / Ra Kalam Bob Moses - "Anything that Ain't Yes, Get Rid of It" [12:07]
4. Brandon Lopez - "Lamed" [18:12]
5. Matthew Lux's Communication Arts Quartet - "Paw Paw" [22:46]
6. Ilia Belorukov & Vasco Trilla - "Moutonner" [27:36]
7. Gerrit Hatcher - "Learn Alternatives to Mercy" [35:28]
8. Pierce Warnecke & Louis Laurain - "Parasitism" [40:05]
9. Tetuzi Akiyama / Nicolas Field / Gregor Vidic - "Synchronous Ancestor" [46:11]
10. Crazy Doberman - "518 wagons for california" [54:49]
11. Rob Mazurek - "Like Bones of Stars" [58:31]
12. Ka Baird & Muyassar Kurdi - "IIIII I" [1:01:19]
13. Charles Barabé - "Mouvement II" [1:03:21]
14. Susan Alcorn / Joe McPhee / Ken Vandermark - "The Eyes of Memory" [1:06:57]
15. Dustin Laurenzi - "Fiesta Piano Solo" [1:16:19]
16. Mako Sica / Hamid Drake - "Enchanted City" [1:21:37]
17. Luke Stewart - "Works for Upright Bass and Amplifier Pt. II" (Excerpt) [1:27:08]
18. Arrington De Dionyso / Noel Meek / Rodrigo Rico - "From the Land of the Wicked King Pt. I" (Excerpt) [1:34:03]
19. Lisa Cameron & Sandy Ewen - "Abyssal Grenadier" [1:37:14]
20. Obnox - "War Guitar" [1:39:16]
21. Quin Kirchner - "Together We Can Explore the Furthest Beyond" [1:46:41]