When Sky Furrows got together in 2016, I was focused on literature and barely went to shows. But over the past few years we’ve played with so many great bands, I find myself getting more of my art fix from music. We did a few shows with Oneida in early 2024 and I was walloped by their relentless braininess and power. They’ll play the same chord progression at warp speed for eight minutes straight, a crisis din of monotony; when they shift it up it feels like a dam breaking. Their 17th (!) album, Expensive Air, harnesses their warped mania brilliantly.
Flutist and saxophonist Wednesday Knudsen works the opposite extreme—she plays quiet, often beatless music that realigns the time centers in your brain, forcing you to slow to her fragile pacelessness. Yet her music is urgent too—ambient is the wrong word—she provides balms for the unsettledness we all feel all the time. She has a new collaboration with Kryssi Battalene, guitarist for Mountain Movers (another great band!), called Ogden Garden, which describes itself as “feathery nutmeg dub” and brings me into a medieval church ruin overgrown with weeds and flowers. I relish any chance to witness the high concept/lowbrow grandeur of Animal Piss, It’s Everywhere, featuring Clark Griffin (Wednesday’s husband and partner in the late Pigeons) and Shannon Ketch from Sunburned Hand of the Man. This is boozy country schmaltz pushed to the brink of derangement. Their new album, Grace, includes lope-y mindbenders like “Beach Song” and “Fried Baloney.”
This article appears in October 2024.
