These are recent and distinguished bands united by the extent to which they’re refined, defined and expanded by electronics, harbingers not of the future but of the immediate present, multiplying and expanding through degrees of transformation, each a legitimate heir to the kinds of informed complexity pioneered by musical outsiders like John Benson Brooks and Sun Ra and literary outsiders like Brion Gysin and William S. Burroughs.
Alexander Hawkins -- No Nation but Imagination (Intakt, 2026)
Pianist/composer Alexander Hawkins has already covered a broad musical spectrum in his career, from Togetherness Music for Sixteen Musicians featuring Evan Parker to Carnival Celestial, his brilliant reinvention of the piano trio with bassist Neil Charles and drummer Stephen Davis. No Nation but Imagination may be his most striking work yet, with a trans-Atlantic quintet that links Chicago-resident flutist Nicole Mitchell and drummer Hamid Drake with British musicians Rhodri Davies, here playing harp and electronics, and turntablist/sound artist Matthew Wright. That’s not a predictable combination, and it immediately lives up to that promise of the unlikely: it’s music that can find a groove, but it’s a groove that hasn’t exactly happened before, suggestive in some ways of the unpredictable musical culture of Intakt label-mates Elias Stemeseder and Christian Lillinger and their Umbra series of recordings.
Liner note author Peter Margasak has traced the project’s complex lineage and associations, beginning with Hawkins’ enthusiasm for the Mandingo Griot Society, a band that Drake played in in the 1970s with Gambian kora master Foday Musa Suso. Mitchell has played with a kora master more recently, the Malian Ballaké Sissoko. Those associations with the harp-like kora triggered the inclusion of harpist Rhodri Davies, who has also worked extensively with electronics, also the arena of Matthew Wright. The resultant ensemble bears a certain resemblance to Wright and Evan Parker’s Trance Map in its integration of acoustic and electronic instruments and processing, the result here a mix of live and studio recordings with further processing.
It’s music that has covered tremendous ground just coming into being, and it’s fascinating how the most exotic of technological procedures admit of a certain alien prettiness, a provocative banality, evident here from the opening “Solo Way Far Gone”: mysterious electronic piano tinkling, at once bearer and judge of the merely pretty, is here elevated by degrees of mystery and alien artifice. The first real group track, “Resolution Each and Every,” suggests that some 1950s exotica by Martin Denny (e.g., “Quiet Village”) has been recovered by some distant and unknown civilization (perhaps Kurt Vonnegut’s refined Tralfamadorians), then altered, expanded and broadcast back to earth, with Mitchell’s flute assuming multiple identities amidst the complex percussion and a certain general wobbling of harp and synthesizer, with the music stretching far beyond the merely exotic. So too does “Mirror No Border”, which bristles with Hawkins’ percussive piano flurries and Mitchell’s alternately piping and soaring lines.
The more extended pieces create increasingly complex spaces. “Lullaby Much Further” combines near silence with a dauntingly mysterious collection of sounds and a complex web of connections, while “Hocket Fierce Peaceful” achieves the contradictory character of its title by setting a flute of almost unearthly tranquility amidst a maze of abstract and decorative electronic keyboards.
Sofia Borges - Rieko Okuda - Peter Van Huffel -- Lagrangian Points (4daRecord, 2026)
Equally mixed in its combinations of the acoustic and the electronic, Lagrangian Points differs significantly in being a documentary recording of a live performance from Berlin’s Morphine Raum, all the electronic processing going on simultaneously with the acoustic. Sofia Borges plays drums. percussion and electronics; Rieko Okuda, piano, keyboards and electronics; Peter Van Huffel alto and baritone saxophones and electronics.
According to the liner note “ Lagrangian Points are zones of delicate balance where forces align and bodies can remain suspended. In that sense, the trio forms a system of its own: each voice holds and is held by the others, maintaining a moving equilibrium, with enough space left open for the imagination to drift beyond its edges.” That particularly double identity is linked to the presence of electronics employed by each trio member, to the extent that instrumental identities can blur into one another.
The opening “Ghost Currents” initially seems to emphasize Okuda’s electronic keyboards and Borges’ percussion, but within moments the music’s distinctive complexity is apparent, many of the sounds traceable to their acoustic origins, but nonetheless operating in a transformative state, the three elaborating waves of sound that might suggest a wholly electronic extension of an improvising ensemble akin to Cecil Taylor’s trio with Andrew Cyrille and Jimmy Lyons.
“Parallax” introduces a subtle world of discreet electronic distortions, near-invocations of piano strings and metallic percussion all of these combining to suggest alien transmissions from space as well as a distinctly human music. Just as Alexander Hawkins’ electronic webs on No Nation But Imagination can make Nicole Mitchell’s flute seem alien, Van Huffel’s alto here might be purely acoustic at times, yet his aptitude for abstraction is such that his alto suggests something quite different, almost a harmonica, its voice swimming in an electronic maze, until electronic alterations to the saxophone draw it wholly into an intermediate zone floating between the acoustic and the electronic.
With the final track, “Hypnopompia”, Van Huffel’s saxophone initially provides an acoustic line in an alien soundscape, but as the surrounding sound grows increasingly menacing (there is a suggestion of hybrid alien predators), his sound gradually mutates, becoming closer and closer to the world that surrounds him, achieved with a brilliant combination of acoustic and electronic techniques. As Van Huffel moves further towards the electronic, Borges briefly inhabits the acoustic role, but the ultimate group movement will be almost wholly electronic.
These two remarkable recordings together articulate a new terrain, reflective of an increasingly mediated world, one in which the likelihood of deception conditions interpretation, one in which art and its appreciation might increasingly stretch both creative and interpretive acts toward surveillance.
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