I started the year with no greater plans than a set at the Brown Building alongside Amy Cimini and Sean Jones playing my songs for voice and cello. Somehow that turned into a full twelve months of gigging and recording, the busiest year I’ve had post-lockdown. Below, the highlights (and lowlights):
In March I had the honor of joining an all-star group of musicians from the greater San Diego-Baja continuum for Necking’s Smoke Show. Coordinating a band is nobody’s idea of a good time, but I hope our twelve different schedules align some day and this group gets to play together again.
Our beloved Bonny finally passed in April, just a few weeks shy of what would have been her eighteenth birthday; according to some goofy dog years calculator I found online that number is too high to compute. Thig crìoch air an t-saoghal, ach mairidh gaol is ceòl, wee lass; chan eil tuil air nach tig traoghadh.
After playing the Witches Tower with Ryan and Piper, I dipped to spend the rest of May high in the Santa Monica Mountains at my sister’s house watching my nephew, with one quick side trip to Ojai to catch Amy, Jessica Pavone and Rob Magill at Bart’s Books (and gorge myself at the excellent Ojai Rotie). Amy dropped a banger the next month, if you haven’t heard it yet:
June opened with my 30th birthday spent in my favorite city in America with a celebratory drink at Top of the Mark, kicking off the deepest spiritual hangover of my life.
July saw the dawn of Banana Summer, a few months which will live forever in infamy alongside the Summer of Sam Jones. To say any more in a public forum would likely prove tremendously incriminating.
Jay asked me to play flute on the score for Djéliya, Memory of the Mandingue back in February but weirdness with the film’s release held things back for a while. I guess in August he’d finally had enough and dropped the score on his own. I have no idea if people will ever get the chance to see the film, but whatever you might imagine while listening to it is probably just as good.
August saw another long-awaited release finally come to fruition when Tall Can came home at last. Ten days ago marked twelve whole years since we first met at Eden for Tony’s The End of the World… As We Know It and I’m incredibly grateful to still have both these fools in my life.
September saw the premiere of Otherkin, Noah’s play of furries at the end of the world. The Road Theater in North Hollywood staged a reading of the script last year during their Summer Playwrights’ Festival before choosing Noah’s play to open their 2026 season. The first ever reading of Noah’s play was held at his old apartment when he was still living in PB, and our entire OG “cast” (Hallie! Vlad! Stephen! Connor!) made it out for the show, though not on opening night, which sold out so quickly even we couldn’t nab tickets in time.
For reasons of pure vanity it was important Folies Meurtrières be my first “real” release of the year. Now I couldn’t really tell you why, since to quote billy woods, “album dropped with a thud / awkward silence, like when the grenade a dud.” I worked my ass off tweaking this album to reach some sort of ideal only to end up so alienated from the final product I hardly gave it any promotion at all. What have we learned, folks? The next album is getting a rush job.
And because I dragged my ass so long, I ended up stepping on my own toes when the same day Histamine Tapes dropped Antihistamine 2025, the latest edition of their annual no-synth ambient compilation, featuring my flute/concertina/organ trio piece “Void of Horn”:
Nathan’s long been a musical hero of mine and I’m tremendously grateful to have had so many opportunities to play together just in the last few months. (And what do you know, we have another album on the way in January.) Territory Games is the eponymous debut of his cross-border quintet featuring myself alongside Kyle Bayquen, Jose Solares and Ivan Trujillo. I really hope this band can find our way into the studio together at some point.
Tall Can and I capped off the year with a bang, dropping pilostyles wildflower the week before his first ever solo photography exhibition showcasing his documentation of the Chicano Park Mural Restoration Project. Hear the album Doth Music dubbed “undoubtedly one of the year’s most enjoyable rap projects“:
As for other people’s music, it seems every year in my listing of favorite new albums I have to reserve a corner for Backwoodz Studioz mainman billy woods, who this year gave us both the excellent Golliwog (plus gowillog with August Fanon) and Mercy with his Armand Hammer bandmate ELUCID. Elsewhere in the Backwoodz, I enjoyed my time with the new PremRock and a trio of great collaborations from doseone & Steel Tipped Dove, Gabe ‘Nandez & Preservation and Human Error Club & Kenny Segal.
My big listening curriculum this year was digging through the discographies of everyone who played with Miles Davis during his electric period, hunting for ever more exotic 70s fusion freakouts. A particular highlight for me was getting better acquainted with the work of Jack DeJohnette, who we sadly lost this year. It was through the 1999 ECM album Invisible Nature I started a tangential journey through the music of John Surman, which brought me to his duo of new albums Cantica Profana and The Athenaeum Concert, on which he, Lucian Ban and Mat Maneri play the traditional Transylvanian music collected by my beloved Bartók. Bartók traveled eastern Europe seeking the “pulsing life of peasant-music,” and in Surman, Maneri and Ban found a collaborator with “an uncanny way of playing these historic melodies in his own language, while never giving up the recipe that made them so durable in the first place.” Something in Surman’s tone and the darkly lilting melodies recalls another electric Miles bandmate, Wayne Shorter, specifically that weird early-middle stuff when he wasn’t afraid to go dark.
Pyrrhon and Scarcity frontman (and erstwhile Those Darn Gnomes guest) Doug Moore put out a series of incredible records this year, none of which were for his “main” bands, running the gamut from the elegant death-doom of Weeping Sores’ The Convalescence Agonies to the outré death metal of Umulamahri (with Andrew Hawkins of Baring Teeth!) to the brute force knuckledragging of Glorious Depravity.
Speaking of discographic deep dives and prolific New York metalheads, I spent a lot of this year worming my way through the catalogs of two of Brooklyn’s finest black metal bands, Krallice and Yellow Eyes. Somehow I fell off paying attention to either band in 2015 when they respectively released Ygg Huur and Sick with Bloom, despite both records containing each respective band’s finest material and representing each group coming into their own as a unit. This year the Brothers Skarstad dropped the excellent Confusion Gate, featuring the homie Patrick Shiroishi on three tracks, no less:
After spending all year with the dozen-plus albums, EPs and experiments it came as something of a relief they only put out two new tracks this year, great as “Inner Peace” is. Catch-up complete!
The two standout films I watched from this year both interrogated the legacies of activism via sweaty Pynchonesque surveillance thriller neo-noirs about fathers trying to save their only children from the ruthless grip of moneyed interests hiding behind the puppet of the State. I’m talking, of course, about One Battle After Another and The Secret Agent. Otherwise I mostly watched big studio horror movies ranging from the sublime (Predator: Badlands, 28 Years Later) to the… less than sublime (Sinners, The Monkey, Final Destination: Bloodlines). I was given a Criterion Channel subscription for Christmas, so if I find the time maybe I’ll get back to watching decent movies in 2026.
I made a major push to write more this year, so if you’ve spent any time around this little blog you may have seen pieces on Bertrand Bonello and Gucci, Keith Jarrett’s Köln Concert and the video installations of Philippe Grandrieux, among others. Expect a lot more nothings in the new year.
I tried to focus on reading “big” books this year, spending significant time with Underworld on a bus ride to LA, Infinite Jest while babysitting my nephew in Malibu, Our Mutual Friend and The Complete Eightball over the summer and War and Peace over the entire last month. Slot Underworld between the Dickens and Clowes and those are more or less ranked in ascending order.
In between the weightier tomes, the NYRB Classics Book Club kept me loaded for bear with slimmer reads old and new, including Echenoz’s Command Performance, Breton’s Nadja, and one of the first books I loved this year, Augusto Monterroso’s Lo demás es silencio, in which the fictional writer Eduardo Torres rattles off the following aphorism:
When a bad year draws to an end
An even worse one may be approaching.
If 2025 was a bad year, great things lie ahead (including a new solo record, a new band, two short films and who knows what else). Thanks to everyone who played, listened or watched a movie with me along the way.
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