A Wednesday lull, tugged into tide by one guitar record 週三的低谷，被一張吉他錄音弄出潮汐

Marisa Anderson — The Anthology of UnAmerican Folk Music, Vol. 1

The conceit is so much better than the album title makes it sound. Anderson, given access to the late Harry Smith's private archive of close to a thousand recordings, did not assemble a sequel to his famous American one. She did the opposite: she pulled nine pieces from places the United States has been in some kind of conflict with since 1970 — Afghanistan, Vietnam, Yemen, Cambodia, Turkmenistan — and transcribed them, slowly, for a single guitar. The opening "Taqsim for Guitar" sits with a 1955 field recording for what sounds like an unhurried month, leaning into string bends to reach the microtones that don't sit on a fretboard. A portion of proceeds goes to Tamizdat, the artist-mobility nonprofit. It is, against the odds of its own subtitle, the most quietly furious solo-guitar record in some time. 標題比內容好懂。Anderson 拿到已故 Harry Smith 私人那將近一千首錄音的訪問權，沒去做美國民謠檔案的續集；她反過來，挑出九首——條件只有一個：1970 年以後美國與那地方至少打過一次仗。阿富汗、越南、也門、柬埔寨、土庫曼斯坦。

Martin Kohlstedt — Kluft

Kohlstedt's seventh and the one where the modular gear, for once, defers to the songs. The German composer has spent three years narrowing the improviser's bandwidth into discrete shapes, asking what happens when a piece is allowed to know what it is before it begins. "Kluft" — chasm — is the right word for the space between the records he made before and the record he made here. It does not eliminate the synthesizer washes that have always been his signature; it just makes them accountable to a melody. 德語裡 Kluft 是"裂縫"。第七張，Kohlstedt 終於把"錄就完事"的即興習慣打包送走，花三年把每首曲子寫成具體的形狀。

Dawn Clement — Dear Ms. Dearie

Fifteen songs from the Blossom Dearie songbook, sung and played by the Seattle pianist with John Clayton on bass, Jeff Hamilton on drums and Steve Kovalcheck on guitar. Matt Wilson produced; the room is Los Angeles. The temptation with Dearie is to mistake her for a wisp and arrange her as one; Clement does the opposite — she finds the harmonic engineering Dearie kept hidden beneath the little-girl voice and lets it carry the room. "Tout Doucement" gets a chamber-quartet patience; "Lies of Handsome Men" arrives without sentimental upholstery. The result is a tribute that listens to its subject more carefully than most tributes ever do. Blossom Dearie 的 15 首歌，Clement 自彈自唱。樂隊是 John Clayton、Jeff Hamilton、Steve Kovalcheck——三塊石頭壓著一隻小鳥，結果小鳥還是飛了。

Open Thread — Waiting Music

Julien Wilson on tenor and electronics, Peggy Lee on cello, Theo Carbo on guitars, Dylan van der Schyff on drums. An Australian-Canadian quartet that took shape in 2023 across a stretch of improvised nights at Melbourne's Bar 303 and recorded their second studio album in a single day at The Warehouse in Vancouver. The title is not a metaphor. The record's defining gesture is the pause between Lee's cello and Wilson's saxophone, neither rushing to fill it. Four players, none of them in front. Julien Wilson（薩克斯 + 電子）、Peggy Lee（大提琴）、Theo Carbo（吉他）、Dylan van der Schyff（鼓）。澳洲-加拿大組合，2023 年在墨爾本 Bar 303 的幾個即興夜裡成形。第二張錄音棚作品，2025 年 6 月在溫哥華 The Warehouse 一天錄完。

Lowertown — Ugly Duckling Union

Olivia Osby and Avsha Weinberg recorded their second album entirely in a basement and built around it an extended universe — a playable Minecraft world, a handbook, plush dolls, a comic. The plot, such as plots go on records like this, follows a duckling named Dale and his friends against a media company designed to keep them apart. The songs are lo-fi in the literal sense (no studio) and high-fidelity in the emotional sense; "I Like You A Lot" is one of the rare love songs the duo has written, and it is built like infatuation actually feels. Stereogum's album of the week. Olivia Osby + Avsha Weinberg 在地下室自己包辦全部工序的第二張專輯。表面：一隻叫 Dale 的醜小鴨聯合朋友對抗一家叫 LBH 的媒體公司——配 Minecraft 世界、手冊、布偶、漫畫。底下：把"在一起"當抗議本身的態度。

James McGowan Ensemble — Threads of Fate

The Ottawa pianist and composer's tenth, his third for the Ensemble, and the longest argument he has yet built. Developed with the youth theatre company KingDom Theatre, it reframes the Greek myth of the three Fates as a meditation on free will, authoritarian control and the kind of community that survives them. Chamber writing slides into jazz-rock passages without losing the through-line. The risk in jazz-classical hybrids is that the narrative will eat the harmony; here the harmony continues to feed the narrative. McGowan 的第十張，第三張樂團編制。希臘三命運女神被搬到當代——自由意志、威權、社群——和青年劇團 KingDom Theatre 合作。器樂寫作在室內樂織體、管絃、爵士-搖滾段落之間換擋。

Gadget — COERCED

Label廠牌

EP

The one record on this list that is actually out — released May 15, picked by Bandcamp Daily as an essential of that week. The Swedish grindcore duo from Gävle have been writing this EP, more or less, for a decade: their last proper release was The Great Destroyer in 2016. Emilia Henriksson, in the band since 2023, appears here for the first time on record. What's striking is the patience — fifty-second songs that find the precise moment to drop to half-speed for a headbang outro, longer textural experiments like "False Pulse" that suggest a full-length is coming and will be more than a continuation. Grindcore from a band that, for once, took their time.

Visible Cloaks — Paradessence

Spencer Doran and Ryan Carlile's first non-collaborative full-length in nine years, and their third overall. Fourteen pieces that move inside a tension the duo borrows from the novelist Alex Shakar — paradoxical plus essence, virtual against real, organic against algorithm. The collaborator list is the tell: Motion Graphics on "Disque," Félicia Atkinson on "Thinking" and "Shapes," and — crucially — Yoshio Ojima and Satsuki Shibano, two of the figures who built the 1980s Japanese environmental music canon that Doran spent the better part of a decade compiling and contextualising for Light in the Attic. The bridge between those two scenes, finally, gets a record of its own. Spencer Doran + Ryan Carlile 九年來第一張非合作的全長，整體第三張。十四首曲子在"虛擬與真實"的張力裡遊動——標題取自小說家 Alex Shakar 把 paradoxical 和 essence 揉成的造詞。