Booker Stardrum - Close-up On The Outside (We Jazz Records, 2026)

By Ferruccio Martinotti

First transitive property of the Free: if A plays with B and B plays with C, A will play with C. From which the second follows: if you liked A, you will like C. The empirical observation of the above, today starts from SML, a quintet composed of bassist Anna Butterss, Jeremiah Chiu synth, Booker Stardrum drums and Gregory Uhlmann guitar. International Anthem's debut album, Small Medium Large, released in 2024, was recorded at ETA in L.A., a venue Jeff Parker used for his quartet, which included Butterss and Uhlmann, on “Mondays at the Enfield Tennis Academy”. Its pyrotechnical synthetic grooves, ranging from Miles's On the Corner or Get up with it infectious pimp jazz, the polyrhythms of Fela Kuti and the greasy funk of Parliament/Funkadelic, guaranteed free fall, joyful listening. From there, Booker Stardrum's new solo album (his fourth, following 2015's Dance And, 2018's Temporary Etc.; and 2021's Crater), released on We Jazz Records, is a short but lateral step. 

Who is Booker, besides being SML's drummer? His official bio describes him as a composer, drummer, and producer, involved in numerous impro/experimental and pop projects, film scores and sound design, through collaborations that include Lisel, Photay, Horse Lords, Wendy Eisenberg, Amirtha Kidambi, Ben Vida, Will Epstein, Jefre Cantu-Ledesma, Chris Williams, Patrick Shiroishi, Carl Stone, Lee Ranaldo, and Nels Cline. Our Man, supported by faithful collaborators Anna Butterss, Jeremiah Chiu, Chris Williams, Lester St. Louis, Logan Hone and Michael Coleman, began mapping out the new album during a stint in the Catskill Mountains in 2022, sketching out recordings of insects and birds and homemade mallet instruments. 

So, a field recording album? Not exactly, since those are reworked through MIDI controllers, samples, and loops. An electronic music album, then? Not only that, acoustic sequences are interpolated into the electro textures, as if to maintain a solid connection (human first, rather than analog) with that farm where it all began, in the quiet of a late summer on the Catskills. Jon Hassell-esque ambient, perhaps? It's a fuel element of an engine that shifts down two gears and hits the gas before going too narcoleptic, just as the sonic iterations hark back to the supreme Necks, but when the synapses connect there, here's an immediate shift in direction. 

Regarding "Third Nature," the album's fourth track, Booker's words are a sort of programmatic declaration for the entire project: "It gets its name from a concept in social ecology, that humans are part of nature even though there have been different philosophies that separate humans from nature. First nature is the natural world, second nature is human development and social ecologists remind us that we are of nature, and then the question is, how can we do a better job, exist, be of nature, and affect nature in a cohabitual way?" Obviously the theme is gigantic and of capital importance, and unfortunately, this album, nor any other album, can’t provide us with the answers. But it is precisely in its minimalism that Close-up On The Outside finds its raison d'être, like those small mechanical devices made of gears and springs that in themselves have no specific function but that you would remain enchanted by looking at for an indefinite time. Its compositions, carved from the dense layering of instruments and manipulated samples with a pantonal harmonic sense and an intuitive approach to rhythm, won't change the music's axis of rotation by a single degree (how many albums do that..?), but they will allow you to spend 33 minutes of irresistible bliss. To play with the oxymoron: a dispensable, necessary listening.