In The Headphones (for March Part 1): Those Who Walk Away, Stimmerman, Damaged Bug
Record Room: Sunday, 3/29
To whom it may interest,
‘Twas a busy March. Leading up to a trip I’d planned with some dear friends of mine from college, the work and prep situations didn’t leave much time for extracurriculars. Ignoring superstition, I landed in New Orleans on Friday, March the 13th. Home base was a hotel on the corner of Toulouse and Bourbon, a hot spot of pedestrian interaction and dialed-up low end booming from every auto driving by. I spent the 6 days eating the best food, listening to a remarkable array of local jazz, and immersing myself as well as possible into the area’s cultural Cuisinart.
Now, I’m back: reacclimatized to domestic and professional life and trying to catch-up on March releases, of which there were many. I’ll likely be breaking these into two parts.
Those Who Walk Away
Afterlife Requiem
Constellation
Released: 3/6/26
Those Who Walk Away is the handle of composer Matthew Patton, whose second LP, Afterlife Requiem, is a 45-minute, nine-track meditation dedicated to the memory of composer Jóhann Jóhannsson. Adding excerpts of some of Jóhannsson’s own archived recordings help build this work, which are used for the “Memorial Environments” tracks, Patton’s sonic environs are composed of layers of steady tonal swelling with wavering intensity and shimmering slices of acute and somber string work (“Seventh Degraded Hymn”) courtesy of the Ghost Orchestra and Possible Orchestra string quintets.
For its entire uninterrupted stretch, each segment of this work adds a new element to distill, a sonic hallmark attached as if to identify what one could hear and infer as a stage of grief. Suddenly breaths are audible (“Memorial Environment #4”) and distant reverb-drenched wailing introduces unease. A deliberate expansion of the soundscape adds chilling isolation to this drone work devotional but, for all its melancholia, there are gorgeous moments as well with bowed instrumentation and choral intervention bringing light.
Afterlife Requiem is currently available from Constellation Records.
Stimmerman
Challenging Music
For Difficult People
Invisible Planet Records
Releases: 3/27/26
Witnessing the online circle jerk that followed the release of Geordie Greep’s The New Sound, I’d like for there to be that same level of prog snob enthusiasm for Stimmerman, a project helmed by musician Eva Lawitts. The band’s third LP, Challenging Music For Difficult People, should be celebrated not only for its intense and manic creativity, but for its total lack of predictability.
Written and composed by Lawitts, Challenging Music For Difficult People defies ease of categorization by bending rock sub-genres till they’re cracked while developing an idiosyncratic musical language that demonstrates both precision and restlessness. This is immediately clear with “Before the Dove,” whose melodic theme is lush and relatively calm till its hammering third act, a raucous and unexpected crescendo loudly closing the track.*
Challenging Music For Difficult People’s title is appropriate to its contents, Lawitts finding ways to answer questions like, “How might Sleeytime Gorilla Museum interpret Frank Zappa’s ‘The Black Page #1 and #2?’” (“Year End Clearance”) and “Does improv belong in pop music?” (“Bent”). Theatrical and ambitious, the multi-act frameworks composed by Lawitts evade the trappings of self-indulgence and there’s as much attention paid to dramatic shifts in sugary tone (“Outer Planets”) and heightening severity (“Trust”) as there is to jamming econo.
Truly, this is music for listeners of anotherkind,
* Note: At risk of plagiarizing myself, I commented in a track review of “Before the Dove” that, as an adaptation of Noah’s Ark, it was written “with as much scene-building imagery as well-considered and nervous musical detail, a marriage of black midi meticulousness and nightmarish theatricality that recalls John Congleton’s The Nighty Nite.” Needless to say, my thoughts haven’t changed.
Damaged Bug
ZUZAX
Deathgod
Released: 3/20/26
“Prolific” is not a strong enough word to describe the rapid-fire creation that defines Osees headmaster John Dwyer. Not willing to be confined to a single creative outlet, Dwyer is involved in many other projects, one being Damaged Bug, which is his electronic side project indebted to Can’s disciplined approach to looped percussion and Silver Apples’ oscillating, circuit-bred voyages. Damaged Bug’s latest release, ZUZAX, is seven years in the making and the first since Bug On Yonkers, which was issued in 2020.
As with any Damaged Bug release, please expect acid-soaked quirk and synth-led pop-flavored amusements. From the outset, “END OF THE WAR” is composed with an implicit jovial musical bounce and endearing synthesizer melody that are both utilized to express some otherwise heavy themes (“Johnny ain’t-a-comin,’ his body’s decomposin,’ in a mound next to the wall / So stand back, a feckless attack, from the very lonely low”). There’s also a starry-eyed quality to Dwyer’s vocals that enforces this juxtaposition. It’s almost cute in spite of lines like “Fuck that, I’m gonna push back / Crack ‘em in the militant maw.”
While tracks like “Double Yolks” and “Rare Lights” could potentially fit into an Osees record (especially within the grooves of 2024’s SORCS 80, which was devised as a non-guitar album), the Damaged Bug brief is met with tracks like “Mozzy Roves & Moves,” a rapid percussive shuffle and flat keyboard motif layered by Dwyer’s off-time verses; and “HOAK,” whose organ stretches and funk propulsion recall the proto-trance urgency of Miles Davis’s “Rated X,” featured on 1974’s Get Up With It. Also evocative is “SIKE WITCH,” whose busy drum pattern and instrumental arrangement reveal ancestral ties to Can’s Tago Mago or Ege Bamyasi, and the minimalist “A MAN WITHOUT A PLANET,” which could’ve been a Graham Lewis composition from Wire’s The Ideal Copy.
That said, Dwyer doesn’t honor his influences with paint-by-numbers pastiche. Himself a hero within the garage psych/art punk fringe, one whose distinct sonic identity is well established and easy to discern, Dwyer’s curated updates are reverent and, at risk of sounding unlearned, very cool, even down to the smooth sax in “OVER-EXPOSED.”
Sincerely,
Letters From A Tapehead
