The Avant Garde Flamenco Trio – Lunar(Redshift Records, 2026)

By Nick Ostrum

Lunar came as something of a surprising to me. I found the title of the group appealing and somewhat cryptic. So, I loaded the music into my media player and clicked play.

For the first 5 minutes, I could not figure out what was happening. The music sounded Latin. The guitar had that recognizable Andalusian flair and emotive sheen. The trumpet blared with a similar snap, sometimes fading into a style reminiscent of later Dennis Gonzalez electro-acoustic productions and sometimes cutting forward in fanfare. Then, an oddly familiar voice cut through, singing in a gruff Spanish. It was in the spacious, non-melodic parts that I started to notice the slightly askew cadences and scales, that evoked the pastures of Mesopotamia as much as the Mexican grasslands. Then, it dawned on me: this is Emad Armoush.

I have written about Armoush before. He has played in Gordon Grdina’s Haram and his own Rayhan, both of which have strong Middle Eastern roots. In the Avant Garde Flamenco Trio, Armoush has distilled his six-strong Rayhan group to a core of three: JP Carter on trumpet and electronics, Kenton Loewen on drums, and Armoush himself on guitar, oud, and vocals. The result is absolutely riveting.

Lunarfollows a flamenco tradition, but, as with the Armoush’s other projects, it strays far into improvisational territory, not just varying a theme or running charts and scales but diving head-first into expansive passages – backed by some wispy electric ambience and Loewen’s soft and itinerant drums – that lack a predetermined center. The melodies and vocal patterns draw the listener in. But it is these long moments, where the musicians fumble for direction through terrain alternately spacious and pastoral and raucously discordant, that hold the album together and distinguish it from the classical and folk traditionalists that have pioneered these forms before.

The title, Lunar, is telling. Per Armoush, the album is about the Middle East, more so than its potential Spanish or Latin American terrain. It is about war, conflict, and suffering. The pastures noted above have been turned to a barren moonscape of rocket pockmarks, twisted and charred flora, absent of the life – the farms, the animals, the crops, the fellaheen, the villages – that preceded. However, the very act of commemoration, of lamentation, is, also, an act of life, that is absent any genuine lunar terrain. A true gift, even if it is riven by suffering and tragedy.

Lunar is available as a download from Bandcamp.