One of the things I most enjoy doing here is reviewing five new/newish albums each month. (I usually do it the first week of the month, but this batch got bumped a week so we could report on Big Ears.) Sometimes I focus on a single genre, and other times I grab whatever’s been sounding good to me, regardless of category. This month’s picks cover a broad range, from mind-swallowing organ drones to brass and reed duos to crushing death metal. Let’s dive in, shall we?

Caroline Davis’s Fallows is a solo album for saxophone and electronics, mostly consisting of original pieces, though it ends with a version of the traditional tune “Barbara Allen” dedicated to the late pianist Geri Allen. It was recorded last year while Davis was on an artistic retreat in Wyoming, and includes field recordings from there (lots of running water and bird calls), as well as samples of Buddhist monk Thích Nhất Hạnh and pianist Connie Crothers. Many of the pieces are simple, mantralike phrases, occasionally featuring overdubbing so you get dialogue between two Davises. The horn is sent through echo and reverb at times, too, and tweaked with electronics to sound like a synthesizer. Some of the more complexly constructed pieces, like the opening “Springtails,” may remind you of Autechre, and “Holocene Rhythms” and “She Know She Is Water” feature choppy, primitive drum machine beats like something Sensational might have rapped over. This is a fascinating, multifaceted album best heard on headphones.

Composer Arnold Dreyblatt’s Descendants is subtitled Music for Four Pipe Organs in One Space, and does what it says on the tin, as they say. It was recorded at the Orgelpark in Amsterdam as part of the Echonance festival in 2025, and according to the album notes it was written especially for the main hall and “realized in the just-intonation ‘Dreyblatt’ tuning system, derived from the first eleven harmonic overtones and their extensions based on the fundamental C (A = 415 Hz). The following intervals, identified on the four organs and corresponding to my tuning system, were used in the composition: 1/1, 9/4, 3/2, 7/4, 11/16, 21/16, 25/16, 35/32, 63/32, 77/64, and 81/64.” I don’t know what any of that means. What I hear is 51 minutes of calming drones, overlapping and harmonizing with each other. I bet if I played it at, like, five times its proper speed, nice little melodies would appear, but at its actual pace and the way my attention span works, I only really pick up on the relationship between two or three tones at a time. And they’re really nice! Most of them are low enough that they don’t even set off my tinnitus. I bet this would sound fantastic on CD, through really big speakers.

Immolation are one of my favorite death metal bands. Incredibly consistent, they pioneered an ultra-heavy style on their debut, 1991’s Dawn Of Possession, and have never deviated from it. They’ve just released their 12th album, Descent. Their work has a density and genuine heaviness rare in the genre, mostly due to founding guitarist Robert Vigna’s use of dissonance and weird, atmospheric, almost psychedelic tones. He leaves a lot of space in the music, and his solos are minimalist but gorgeous. Second guitarist Alex Bouks provides eerie harmonies and more crushing riffs. Meanwhile, drummer Steve Shalaty punctuates the band’s doomy riffs with rumbling fills, rather than a jackhammer beat. The abstraction of his timekeeping reminds me of Rashied Ali’s “pulse” rhythms. Bassist/vocalist Ross Dolan’s voice is as much a groan as a roar, and the lyrics are sharp and perceptive, attacking religious belief not from a rote anti-Christian perspective but from a more intellectually probing position, asking in effect, why do you settle for these comforting myths instead of confronting the darkness? But it’s the pure visceral power of the music that’s what keeps me coming back to these guys, album after album. Immolation’s music sounds like a mountain breathing, and Descent is as good as anything they’ve ever done. The compositions and performances are absolutely beautiful.

Oboe player Heinz Holliger has been recording for ECM for almost 40 years, making his label debut on a 1987 album by cellist Thomas Demenga, which featured three Holliger compositions. His latest release, con slancio, includes premier recordings of six new pieces written between 2018 and 2020, as well as versions of Jürg Wyttenbach’s Sonate (1961), Jacques Wildberger’s Rondeau (1962), György Kurtág’s aphoristic con slancio, largamente and Toshio Hosokawa’s Musubi (Knots), the latter two of which were written to celebrate Holliger’s 80th birthday in 2019. The album features Holliger and Marie-Lise Schüpbach on both oboe and English horn, and it pushes buttons in my head that are rarely touched. Now, look: We all know that the oboe is a hard instrument to love. Even its prettiest notes have a duck-call quality. But this is really beautiful music that sounds like nothing else in my collection, occasionally baroque but just as often sparse and meditative, almost sounding like European improv. This is 100% composed music, and yet I wouldn’t have been at all surprised to suddenly hear Tony Oxley rattling and swooshing around, or Derek Bailey scraping and pinging.

Now that I live in Montana, I spend a significant amount of time driving. I plug my digital Walkman (a Sony NW A45; I don’t think they make them anymore) into the aux port and off I go. I find that spending a half hour to an hour on the highway at 70-75 miles an hour is a great time to listen to electronic music, so I’ve been buying a lot of DJ mix compilations on Bandcamp the last couple of years, particularly the Fabric Presents and DJ-Kicks series. DJ-Kicks: Sofia Kourtesis came out recently, as did Fabric Presents DJ Tennis and Fabric Presents Red Axes. I bought all three.

With your purchase, you get not only the actual DJ mix, which in the case of the Sofia Kourtesis set runs 78:29, but also the individual tracks. It includes four of Kourtesis’ own pieces, a bunch of music by people I’ve never heard of, and Aphex Twin’s “Flim.” This is not a pounding house or techno mix; it’s a collection of rhythm-driven, but abstract and often somewhat drifting tracks (though there is some house music, like Laurence Guy’s “Make Me Feel Better” and Myd’s “You’re A Star” and especially Joy Anonymous’s “JOY (Look Up Now),” which has an almost gospelish feel that makes me think of Floorplan). Even when you listen to the tracks as a compilation, which is my preference, the whole thing has a flow — it brings you in gently, and takes you out the same way.