the year ends
Hardcore, Concentric Rings, LA shows
hi all -
happy new year, the only holiday I respect. Time, a shared constraint, is always worth marking and celebrating. I’m sitting in a cafe in Denver writing this with a new release from the always-stellar Canary Records playing through my headphones that are flaking off on my head.
For reasons that will become clear sometime in the next few months, I’ve been thinking a lot about Walter De Maria’s film Hardcore a lot lately. It remains deeply haunting to watch open landscape colliding with cowboy caricature, all propped up with american imperialism. We’re all having similar conversations, so I don’t need to repeat much. ICE hasn’t always been and ICE will see its end, my main source of hope right now is watching videos of people standing up to federal agents in small and simple ways.
It’s been interesting to look out at the world and see the manufacturing of consent play out so plainly. AI is being forced on us and we don’t want it, a tool of the lazy and afraid. These technologies truly offer nothing valuable and are rapidly eating up our natural and human resources. Living is about being alive, I have no desire to outsource even a fraction of that. I know tends towards Ludditism but I see nothing to be gained there and I truly do lose respect for the people I see out there leveraging these technologies. There’s more to it than that, but no one is here for my opinions.
This weekend I’ll be back in LA with my horn, playing a couple of shows. On Saturday I’ll be playing the Sudden Somethings festival in a quartet with Aaron Michael Butler, Jeff Schwartz, and Jonathan Piper. Sunday evening I’m playing a house show in a trio with Tim Feeney and Adam Lion, email me if you’d like details for that one.
On Friday, Sawyer Editions will release a new record from my group Forming, playing Michael Pisaro-Liu’s Concentric Rings in Magnetic Levitation. The piece is quietly monolithic, something that sounds simple but stretched our musicianship. I’m leaning into being a “multi-instrumentalist,” playing piano on this record. Making this record was the beginning of what I hope is a long stream of work in this vein, I hope you spend some time with this one. While I’m talking new releases, if you haven’t checked out my two end of year records from my old group Andrew Weathers Ensemble or my new group Reeder/Seward/Weathers, maybe now is a good time.
Now the sound in my ears has shifted to my friend Ryan Raffa’s new collaboration with Sam Prekop, Only Came to Say Goodbye. This year I’m hoping to spend more time at home and dedicate my road time to realizing some large scale field recording projects. Ideally, that will mean spending more time standing in Various Rivers. If you have advice on gleaning the benefit of Instagram without sustaining daily brain damage, please email me. As ever, I’m available to mix and master your records and even produce and record your project. Making records is my favorite thing to do and I would like to do that with you. Thanks for your eyes here, hope that you are doing your best.
AW