The new album from Joshua Chuquimia Crampton takes its name from the Andean ceremony Anata, which gives thanks for the harvest before the rainy season. Made up of seven dense and distorted instrumentals, the record is the California-based Aymara musician's attempt at capturing the energy of ceremonial music not some rosy, polished version, but how it might sound recorded on a phone, clipping and all.
If Big Hotel felt like the band homing in on their prowess and energy, Desert So Green explores the limits of their sound, seeing what new styles they can dive into, deconstruct, and rebuild. The result is both the band's most experimental and cohesive record to date, a mass of cosmic krautrock, dreary ambient synths, and eerie avant-garde touches that guarantee any conventional song structure or form could never take root.
Miri Tyler of DC punks Ekko Astral told us about five of her favorite bands from the DC-area, past and present: Ekko Astral's most recent album was 2024's Pink Balloons, one of our favorite albums of that year. They've released some singles since then, most recently last month's "horseglue," which takes them into noise rock territory. Watch the video for that below.
As we become more comfortable in the digital world, our tolerance for any discomfort in the physical world seems to decrease. We stand in the corner at the party looking at our phones to avoid making small talk; we let our eyes flit between screens to smother any thought that we might otherwise have to sit with alone. If this is what we do for fun, then what does work look like?
The album opens with a reading of Douglas Dunn's The Kaleidoscope, a poem about being trapped in a cycle of grief, as sparse drums boom arhythmically alongside bursts of noise and a low metallic drone. As it transitions into the distant shriek of vocalist / guitarist Chip King, "A Lament" sputters in fits and starts as it struggles to take flight.