["Happy Friday, Everyone From NPR Music, It's New Music Friday. I'm Stephen Thompson, here with Evan Miller of WISO in Yellow Springs, Ohio. Welcome to the show, Evan. Thank you so much for having me. Happy to be here. It is a pleasure to have you. We have a very unusual week of new music. Including an album that dropped on Tuesday morning, we are still just getting used to it ourselves. It's by Willow Smith, who records under the name Willow. Check out our tiny desk concert from 2024 if you haven't seen it. Willow's new album is called Petal Rock Black and the Guests Alone. Suggest how fast I'll she is at fusing accessible pop with more left-field sounds. Yeah, the Tuneyard's guest spot later in the record makes a lot of sense to me. There's really a lot of things. I'm a vegetation one of the earlier tracks as soon as I heard it. I'm like, this sounds like Tuneyard's. Yep. I can tell she's been jamming on maybe the new Tuneyard's record. I don't want to say your right. Just let me feel it's the soul. I admittedly haven't checked back into the Willow catalog since she was making rock music the last time I dropped in. So this one was quite a pleasant surprise addition to this week. The arrangements are fantastic. A lot of really funky rhythms and grooves. Yeah, Willow is extraordinarily inventive and never makes the same record twice. And that really comes through here. And you can kind of even just tell looking at the track listing and seeing who the guests are on this record. In addition to Tuneyard's George Clinton from Peefunk kind of pops up in the intro. Kamasi Washington shows up and Lens, obviously jazz to the mix. There's a cover of Princess I Would Die for You. And at the same time, all of these ideas are kind of swirling around in an album that is 12 songs in 26 minutes. You have songs that play out almost as fragments. And it's where ideas are just ping-ponging around. And you get through so many different sounds in those 26 minutes. Funny to hear music from somebody like Prince that's so propulsive kind of turned into this sort of wonky alternative version. It's very cool. That is Willow. Her new album is called Pedal Rock Black, kind of including it as a bonus entry on this week's show because it just dropped Tuesday morning. Totally off schedule with the way music is really coming out these days. I also wanted to note that the rapper Baby Keem, who's known for his musical and familial association with Kendrick Lamar, Baby Keem has a new album out today called Casino with a dollar sign in place of an S. The label didn't make advances available, but it is one of this week's biggest releases. And we didn't want it to go by without a mention. So we've mentioned Willow, we've mentioned Baby Keem. We'll mention a couple more big stars in the lightning round. But for this show, Evan, you and I are going to mostly focus on some left field music, classical punk jazz, Turkish jam rock. You name it. We're going to kick off with Peca Custisto. And his new album is called Willows. So this is a fascinating hour of music. Basically split between these kind of gorgeous string based classical pieces and folk classical hybrids that are headlined by the folk singer Sam Amadon. If you're not familiar with Peca Custisto, he's a Finnish violinist conductor composer, who comes from a long line of composers and musicians in Finland. And he uses traditional music of Finland as a backdrop, but is willing to expand really well beyond it. He's also the artistic director of the Norwegian Chamber Orchestra. He works with all sorts of orchestras. And so what you get on this record is this collection of collaborations that reach from classical to folk music and beyond. Yeah, I am a contemporary classical music person myself in my other life. That's what I went to school for. So especially seeing the Caroline Shaw and Ellen Reed pieces appear on this record. Those were fantastic. A little bit more in the boundary pushing side sound wise on this record. The Ellen Reed piece has a lot of great extended technique stuff and is actually written for Custisto, for dedicated to his late brother, Yaco. Yeah, and that song is called a desidirium. You mentioned the piece written by Caroline Shaw. And you know, he's really one of the great living composers, frankly. She has a piece called Plan in Elevation, which other artists have performed. It's from about a decade ago. And here he revisits that piece. And it really, it's such a nice pairing because if you love her compositions, you know how good she is at kind of maximizing the drama, while letting the piece kind of constantly change shape and allow new sounds to kind of scream through the mix. She is such a great composer. And just hearing the two kind of collaborating across time was just wonderful for me to hear. And she has this great knack of drawing inspiration from the greats of classical music and pushing things forward into modern sounds. A highlight of this album, this Caroline Shaw string quartet, absolutely. Part of what is so fascinating about this record, you know, I listened to this album before I really knew any of the context surrounding it. I just was like, Pecacusi Stope hit play. And you know, you get these gorgeous sweeping classical pieces. And then around halfway through, it takes this sharp left turn where it brings in Sam Amodon, the the the folk singer, for a series of pieces, they're from Sam Amodon's catalog, you know, recorded originally recorded by Amodon, you know, between 2008 and 2013, you know, generally traditional pieces, but pieces Amodon has recorded before. And here, Pecacusi Stope works with Sam Amodon and the arranger Niko Mouli for these pieces that are melding folk music and classical. I wish I was a poet, could write in fine hand, I'd write my love a letter, once she long understood. Yeah, the blending of folk music and classical is so strong all over this release. Picking Sam Amodon and Niko Mouli for the arrangements for these folk songs is, I mean, that's it's a it's a very clear choice on success for these both, both folks with lots of experience in not only, you know, crystal clear arrangements, but taking such care and time with this folk music. It's beautiful, beautiful work. That is Peca Cucisto, his new album is called Willows. Next up, Gorgeous Record from Manu Delago and Max ZT, it's called Doose. So, if you're not familiar with these artists, Manu Delago is an Austrian musician and composer. He's been playing the hand pan, which is kind of like a steel drum you play with your hands, it produces this kind of soft ringing form of percussion. He's been playing around with that kind of percussion for decades now. Max ZT plays the hammered dolcemer, it was funny when I was reading up on him. I saw the phrase, hailed by NPR as the Jimmy Hendrix of the hammered dolcemer. Oh, I saw that too. Which was like man NPR, you know, we are what we are. They choose to fail, big shoes. Exactly, but honestly, like listening to this record, I get it. That's not wrong. Both, you know, these kind of virtuoso musicians, you know, they've worked with a bunch of other people. Manu Delago is toured and performed with people like Bjork and the cinematic orchestra. Working together, they recorded this album in a 13th century monastery in the Austrian Alps. And throughout this record, you get a pairing of this ancient instrument, the hammered dolcemer, with a pretty new instrument, the hand pan, and what you get is just this timeless, beautiful, radiant set of songs. I am actually a percussionist, so thanks for tossing me a percussion record to listen to. Break, especially. I hear like buzzing in the dolcemer. There's, it almost sounds like water might be being used with the hand pan. There's this sort of like bending to the pitch of it. I'm trying to route through my own experiences. I'm like, how do they do that? I feel like I might know. I could imagine water being incorporated because like hearing this instrument, you know, people have heard a sample of the sound. You can almost feel that he's hitting a pan with the heel of his hand. Like you can, you can feel like that is the soft pad of a hand making this percussion sound. It's some of the softest percussion you'll hear. Yeah, the hand pans are really fascinating instruments. I first heard these with Portico quartet years ago. So if you like the sound of this instrument, maybe go check them out too. The fundamental pitch it can hold, especially in bass is so strong, but so delicate. It's a really, really neat instrument, which is not to say that the hammered dolcemer is not also a very fascinating, interesting instrument. Well, and they pair so beautifully. Yes, there's kind of a softness to the combination of sounds. There's a track here called Love All. And it's just a stunner, you know, it's this kind of softly chiming, meandering piece. And the music pairs beautifully with that title. It feels listening to it. The world feels like a more welcoming place. I am always welcome and amenable to presentations of percussion that show their more lyrical side, their capabilities beyond just rhythms that they're so open the possibilities with these instruments, especially when they're melodic and harmonic like these. I really love this record, especially I had to listen to it while I was doing dishes. And the perfect dishes I just got to zen out while doing dishes. It was fantastic. Like, why am I enjoying this? There's another one I wanted to call out on this record, 40-40. And it's a busier, more technical piece. There's almost a dizzying quality to it where you're really getting a sense of the technique and the precision that these artists are able to bring to the song, but it still has a certain softness to it. But again, not only does it pair well with dishes, it pairs with staring into the middle distance on a Sunday morning, which is how I'm going to enjoy this record going forward. That is Manu Delago and Max ZT. Their new album together is called Duce. We've got some more records we're going to discuss in depth as well as a lightning round of some of our other favorite records out today, February 20th. But first, let's take a quick break. From NPR Music, it's new music Friday. I'm Stephen Thompson here with Evan Miller from WISO and Yellow Springs, Ohio. Evan, before we get to our next record, tell us what's going on the station. Well, actually in a few weeks from now, we will be moved into our brand new studios here in Yellow Springs. We are just wrapping up getting new gear installed and putting the finishing touches on the building. It'll be our first location not on the campus of Antioch College since our founding in the 50s. So a big moment coming up for us this spring. Meanwhile, we're a mixed format station. So we have news from NPR, of course, in our great local newsroom. We have music. We have storytelling with our Community Voices program and our Center for Preservation and Archives musically for our purposes now. We're about a year and a quarter into our all music channel, Novophonic.fm, that will be moving with us over to the new station. And I host two programs at WISO. I host our midday music show from Monday to Friday. And then I have an experimental music program called the outside I do on Sundays, which comes in handy for some of the stuff we're talking about on this episode. I was going to say we're glad we picked you this week because you're perfectly suited for this set of records. Thanks. Nice. And people can listen to WISO.org. Yes, WISO.org and Novophonic.fm. Excellent. Alright, next up a new record from the Mesthetics and James Brandon Lewis. It's called Deface the Currency. So the Mesthetics are one of the several post-Fugazi off-shoot bands. Joe Wally and Brandon Canty, a bassist and drummer of Fugazi, respectively, joined by Anthony Perogue on guitar. And this is their quartet with the saxophonist James Brandon Lewis. It's their second album together and also their second on the mighty impulse records. Taking the punk rock, free jazz thing that the Mesthetics were already doing and just adding James Brandon Lewis into the mix who is a fine jazz saxophonist and all sorts of contexts on his own. So just sort of amping up the intensity with an additional member in the group. Yeah, I mean, it's wild how much this record feels like jazz and how much it feels like punk. It's really one of the truest genre fusions that I've heard in a while because it absolutely is both. And you know, the Mesthetics records, you know, the Mesthetics are an instrumental band. So they've certainly gone down jazz paths before, but here it's really wild how much it sounds exactly like both. Yeah, they're bonafides in all of this shine so clearly and they're able to bounce back and forth effortlessly between just like blistering, free jazz improvisations and then just kind of get into these more straight ahead punk modes together. I somehow have missed I think two different opportunities to see this group where I'm at right now and now with this new record coming out, I will fix this now. I will go see them because I really want to see it after listening to this record. It's remarkable hearing it how, you know, many directions they're able to go with this and you have a track like the title track to face the currency, which is just a blast of like twisty hard driving jazz punk and it's just keeps building up an intensity. But then it kind of gives way to a track called Justations, which is much heavier on the jazz side of the punk jazz equation. But then even that song is then able to kind of ramp up over the course of its runtime to give way to these like kind of just big blazing, scrunky guitar solos. Yeah, there's always fire kind of working underneath some of this or just right out in front of you. Universal security was one that I distinctly remembered having this more kind of lyrical head to it. It reminds me of like a Mingus kind of line, but then it just explodes after that comes out. I'm like, okay, great. We're back to the flames here. Yeah, I mean that track is just a wall of noise and static and just this free jazz storm, you know, that plays out over the course of that song. And then, you know, you get the closing track, Serpent Tongue, parentheses, slight return, you know, which is kind of gives you this like atmosphere before the storm at first, before building to a kind of perfect aesthetics. James Brandon Lewis, frenzy. That is the aesthetics and James Brandon Lewis. Their new album together is called Deface the Currency. Next up, Evan, we're going to get even we're going to get weird. Next up, Hen O'Glade, their new album is called Discombobulated. And then, I read Rebirth, V1 Us to Feel, but workers can win. So if you're unfamiliar with Hen O'Glade, their name comes from the Welsh phrase for Old North, which is the Celtic region that contains southern Scotland and Northern England and the early Middle Ages. You know, each of the bands for members is from kind of a different tribal region of the Old North. And the bands songs are all about mixing, you know, as you can imagine, the ancient and the modern kind of recurring theme in this week's episode. The traditional and the avant-garde, how it comes out is as this wild, weird mix of art pop and folk music and psychedelia and spoken word. Children's voices pop up. It is a very, very strange sound. One of the most appropriate album titles I've come across in recent memory, Discombobulated is 100% right on it. I feel like I'm like stepping into another universe when I hear music like this. I'm trying to wrap my head around how you make this. And I'm bewildered in the best way. I think bewildered in the best way is a really good way of putting it, but at the same time, it's weird and in some ways it can feel weird for the sake of weird, but at the same time, there's real force behind it and there's real lyrical energy where the messaging that comes through is pretty powerful and pretty profound. You take a track like Scales Will Fall, you know, which is this eight and a half minute, truly eccentric journey, full of these weird bouncy synths and half-wrapped vocals. But then you listen to those words and they're about human rights. They're about systems in collapse. And you get a sense of like, these aren't just weirdos. They're weirdos with a lot to say about the state of the world. You know, this ongoing theme of folk music, especially popping up on this round of albums, English folk music, like what they're pulling from, sonically in some ways, definitely has a lot to do with that kind of lyrical material often. So they're sonically pushing in a million wild directions, but still playing into this tradition of work. How you fold those things together, successfully, the way they're doing is amazing. Well, and in some ways it kind of keeps getting weirder, right? There's a track called Clara, which may be the weirdest song here, which is really saying a lot. It's got this mix of strange distorted voices and effects and these sing-song verses and these minimal kind of drum patterns and it's dark and childlike at once. And honestly, Evan, I don't even know how we excerpt this song in a way that conveys how strange it is. Oh, producers, good luck. Take your pick. No, a call, but I'll just give thumbs up from the booth. The low voice that pops up periodically in this is the thing I remember the most, like what is the thing? And that kind of gives way to this like spoken word track called Land of the Dead. And eventually, you're just listening to this record. I don't know how your process of prepping to talk about these things, I just kind of take a lot of notes. And my notes say, Land of the Dead is get this weird. Correct. That is Hen O'Glead. Their new album is called Discombobulated. We've got one more record we're going to talk about in depth as well as a lightning round of some of the other terrific albums out today, February 20th. First, we're going to take one last break. From NPR Music, it's new music Friday. I'm Stephen Thompson here with Evan Miller of WYSO in Yellow Springs, Ohio. Last up before we get to our lightning round, new album from Alteen Gunn. It's called Garripe. So Alteen Gunn are a Dutch Turkish psychedelic band, which is always really fun to explain. Some people when I tell people about this band, a lot of their music is steeped in Turkish folk traditions, but taken in this psychedelic or electronic way. And this one in particular is all music from Turkish folk artist Nashet Arthage. Yeah. And it was really interesting. That gives it kind of this thematic throughline and a certain consistency that allows them to explore beyond it. But you really do get a sense of like, I need to check out Nashet Arthage's sound. You know, he died in 2012 and this is kind of a tribute to him. But these songs really kind of take the bones of his songs and use them as, you know, kind of a frame for some really sonically expansive and beautiful and just really interesting arrangements. Yeah, it feels like the band is moving towards a more organic place after getting a lot into the electronics zone over their past couple of records or so. And that feels really appropriate for this record taking on exclusively Turkish folk tunes. The album opens with a track called Narades in Sen and it's just this kind of wild, barreling rock jam. You know, they've got this really great kind of psych rock sound. And when you listen to that track, you can practically see smoke wafting from the speakers as it plays. And it's so, it was so interesting to me listening to this record again last night, you know, under headphones kind of late at night. And how many of the songs for me somehow managed to evoke smoke, you know, that this sense of like, there's something in these arrangements. There's something about the way these songs kind of un-delay. And it's like the pattern that smoke can make as it drifts into the sky. And that's a really heady feeling to have when you're listening to a record. Saki Delic Music has such a long history of taking on folk music or music of this kind. Like, I immediately think of the 13th four elevators doing like Dylan Tunes back in the 60s. The qualities you can pull out of these simple arrangements when you kind of open them up in these other contexts is so cool. So many highlights here. There's, there's a song, Olderrn Benny, which is this kind of trippy psych jam. The synth line that runs through this song is so nudily and irresistible. But it's kind of this framework for the song to get wilder and freaky as it goes along. But in a way that feels thoroughly inviting as a listener, even though this is not necessarily music that I'm familiar with, I'm not, you know, deeply entrenched in Turkish music. No, neither am I. I, you know, I never want to assume. But it really, but it really lets you in and it feels like a gateway. When I was reading about this record, the frontman for this band, Erdogan, each of it yielded, he was inspired to become a musician in childhood listening to these cassettes that his family had of Artaj's music. It feels like a very personal album to finally be able to put some of this music that he grew up with to tape this way. That is Altin Gun. Their new album is called Gareep. Evan, as you know, we could not possibly get to every big record out today, February 20th. And obviously we went, you know, we went a, a little left field, you know, for this show, but we did want to include a lightning round of some of the other albums out today. I'm going to kick us off with Megan Moroni. She's one of the decades biggest breakout stars in country music. She mixes kind of classic country vibes with a conversational heartache forward sense that pairs really well with contemporary pop. Her last record, MIOK, was a major breakthrough and now she's followed it with a sparkly kind of pop-flect set of country jams that sound like future hits to me. Megan Moroni's new album, which features guest appearances by Ed Sheeran and Casey Musgraves is called Cloud 9. So my first lightning round pick is new music from guitarist Chris Forsyth. He has a new trio called Chris Forsyth. What is now joined by John Moran on bass and Joey Sullivan on drums, both from a great Philly jazz trio called Bark Culture. It's like a three-piece record of these about 20 minute kind of shaggy jams that move around between jazz or like freer rock and improvisatory context. All three of these musicians have one foot in one world and one foot in the other as far as the sounds covered on this album go and they're really playing at some of their best on this one. Chris Forsyth's What is Now with our new album, Both and. In the late 2010s, the Michigan R&B singer-songwriter Choker looked like he was kind of a major rising star. His vibey, stylish psychedelic sound drew comparisons to Frank Ocean. He was following a successful album called Honey Bloom with a string of EPs. Then he took a nearly seven-year hiatus. Now he's back with a new full length record that picks up kind of where he left off and promises to reignite all that next big thing talk. Choker's new record is called Heaven Inc. Soul. The New York band MX Lonely has a new one out now called All Monsters. As I'm sure some of your listeners might be aware of, Shoe Gays and Jason Music has really had quite a roaring back in the past few years. MX Lonely kind of occupies a little bit more grunge-influenced corner of this with their new album All Monsters. Finally, the Grammy-winning folk rock powerhouse Mumford & Sons released a comeback record called Rushmere last year. It was their first album in almost seven years. Now we've already got a follow-up less than a year later and it sounds like the stuff of a big roots pop resurgence complete with guest appearances by Chris Stapleton, Hozier, Gigi Perez, Gracie Abrams, and more. Mumford & Sons new album is called Price Fighter. And that is our show for this week. Thank you so much Evan Miller for taking time out of your week at WYSO in Ohio. Absolutely. Thank you so much for having me. It has been a pleasure. If you enjoyed this week's show, we always appreciate a positive review on Apple or Spotify or whatever app you're listening to right now. This episode was produced by Noah Caldwell and El Manion and edited by Otis Hart. Our production assistant is Dora Levitt. The executive producer of NPR Music is Saraya Mohamed. We'll be back next week to discuss new music with Raina Doris, host of World Cafe at WXPN in Philadelphia. Until then, take a moment to be well, step outside and take a big gulp of fresh air and treat yourself to lots of great music.
