Noise for traditional Asian instruments, juggling with the sound of cornets, Central European guitar primitivism, and the excellent Lonnie Holley album with guests. Here are my four albums of the week.

I like listening to instruments that don’t sound like their original sound. Louis Laurain is a master at this—I remember his performance in the back of the church of St John with the band Lumpeks or the extraordinary album Pulses, Pipes, Patterns. Now, he is joining forces with the extroverted Pierre Bastien, with whom they look for sounds where there are none and play with them, like wizards who pull new sounds out of a hat. 

The Paulownia trio is similar, improvising on the edge of silence, reverberation, feedback, and noise. By playing traditional instruments from Asian countries, they bring a whole new quality to improvised music. This is one of the most interesting releases of 2025.

But looking at seemingly classical sounds is interesting – Jakub Šimanský works wonders on the acoustic guitar. At the same time, Lonnie Holley surprises in such a way that it is difficult to tear yourself away from his new album. I recommend the four most interesting albums of the week.

Jakub Šimanský
What Do You Mean By That?
(Self-released)

I was delighted with the duo Šimanský/Niesner album, released in 2022. Meanwhile, the two musicians are successfully developing their activities. Tomas Niesner released the beautiful Bečvou 3 years ago, and Jakub Šimanský returns with his third solo album, What Do You Mean By That? The album features songs brewing in his head for the last eighteen years. Each story is separate, using different guitar tunings and referring to various traditions. Šimanský skips between aesthetics with ease, venturing into bluegrass, Americana, blues, or American primitivism with his fingerpicking, freely maneuvering between moods. Sometimes he plays intensely and densely, letting sounds seep out of the instrument, wailing, gently creating successive chords. The sound of his guitar has a melancholic flavor but, at the same time, firmness, lyricism, and trance-like depth.

Paulownia
Paulownia
(Tripticks Tapes)

I once wrote about Tripticks Tapes, one of the most interesting record labels focusing on improvised and experimental music. One of the characteristics of this label is the selection of artists who use unusual instruments in their practices, far beyond the free-jazz idiom. Paulownia is a perfect example of this – they use traditional Far Eastern instruments such as the ajaeng, koto, or guzheng. Although acoustic, they offer an almost doubled spectrum of possibilities on several levels. The three artists colorfully fly through their playing on string instruments, perfectly emphasizing the synergistic qualities of the instruments while at the same time enhancing their sound with effects, giving the instruments depth, which, combined with the often expressive playing, borders on characteristic oriental sounds, but also creates a wailing or thickening wall of sound, bordering on noise music. The effect is stunning.

Pierre Bastien & Louis Laurain
C(or)N(e)T
(Rose Hill Records)

Two eccentric musicians who play cornets and a bunch of different instruments. Laurain and Bastien have long been expanding the sound possibilities of these and other wind instruments, going beyond their obvious possibilities, creating on the borderline through sonorism, reaching for electronics or purely acoustically. Their album is about experimenting with form, tapping, hooting, using the most unusual sounds on the borderline of concrete music, creating percussion instruments out of wind instruments, playing underwater trumpets, playing with paint brushes, wooden flutes, and a whole range of instruments. It is almost a sound panorama, a palette from which musicians draw endlessly in search of the unexpected and surprising. It is far from the classical form of an album but also far from a clean and structured one. Surprising, leading the ear and breaking with habits.

Lonnie Holley
Tonky
(Jagjaguwar)

Lonnie Holley has been active as a visual artist for almost four decades but has been a musician since the early 2000s. His albums are extraordinary stories, musically drawing on blues, jazz, and folk, in which he tells the story of the world around him, focusing on America. He is fascinating and relaxed at concerts, as he showed in 2023 at the closing of Unsound, a hippie frivolous performance. Tonky is a pulsating, lush story, a reflection on reality to which he invites guests such as Angel Bat Dawid, Alabaster DePlume, and Billy Woods, who are close to him stylistically but also in terms of openness and drawing from different musical worlds. The result is a versatile story with an engaging plot, complex instrumentation, a cinematic, hip-hop, or folk flavor, and an unrestricted yet thought-provoking and moving narrative thanks to the American’s reflective, preaching voice.

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