This week’s guide is by CF Smith and contributors Arifur Rahman, Words By Shoaib, Gavin Senaratne and Irfan Ayaan.
Each week at Twistedsoul, we showcase the finest new releases from across the globe. We scour Between The Cracks to bring you releases that might may have flown under your radar. This week, we’re highlighting new albums from Gregory Uhlmann, Midori Hirano, Ishmael Ali, Max Kutner and more. Lend an ear to the music, and if it strikes a chord, show some love to the artists and labels by supporting them.
Albums
Gregory Uhlmann – Extra Stars
Lots of great music coming from Chicago these days, and Gregory Uhlmann’s new album Extra Stars is yet another tasteful entry in the International Anthem jazz-adjacent continuum. Uhlmann only really landed on my radar a few years back, first through his Small Day album, then by way of his collaborations with Josh Johnson, Sam Wilkes, and the shape‑shifting SML project. He’s been shaping a quietly idiosyncratic world for years, and his latest solo album feels like the clearest, sharpest expression of that vision yet. Fourteen tracks, most of them barely cracking over three minutes, yet each one manages to hit with precision. Uhlmann treats melody like a half-remembered object he keeps turning over in his hands, finding fresh angles in every nick and dent. The record’s 14 pieces move with the logic of private moods rather than finished compositions: ‘Pocket Snail’ creeps like the shelled gastropod in the title, ‘Lucia’ turns Alabaster DePlume’s signature breathy reed work into a weather system, and ‘Burnt Toast’ compresses a whole crooked grin into 85 seconds. Even when the album risks dissolving into ambient decor, (View Below)Uhlmann’s instinct for odd detail, glitches, warbles, synthetic chirrups, little stabs of harmonic ache, keeps pulling it back toward something different. What makes Extra Stars land is that Uhlmann never mistakes delicacy for vagueness. These tracks are breezy, but they aren’t lightweight; they’re packed with patient craft, sly rhythmic thinking, and emotional ambiguity. ‘Days’ hangs there like a thought you can’t quite finish, part self-soothing mantra, part low-burning existential fog, while pieces like ‘View Above’, ‘Bristlecone’ and the brilliant ‘Back Scratch’ suggest a composer more interested in curiosity than cohesion, and smart enough to know those can sometimes be the same thing. You need this album in your collection! – CFS
Midori Hirano – OTONOMA
Berlin-based composer and synthesist Midori Hirano has carved a name for herself at the intersection of classical composition and electronic experimentation. With OTONOMA, she refines that approach into an ambient album built on silence and spatial awareness. The title itself hints at this philosophy: in Japanese, “oto” means sound, and “ma” refers to the space or interval between things, making OTONOMA loosely translatable as “the space between sounds.” The album’s opening statement, ‘Illuminance’, also serves as its conceptual foundation. Built around modular synth arpeggios, the track layers shifting harmonies to create a luminous ambient landscape. In contrast, ‘Rainwalk’ is one of the album’s most intimate moments, stripping the music back to a solitary piano. The album closes with ‘Was It A Dream’, a nocturne-like composition that blends piano lyricism with subtle electronic sounds. What ultimately defines OTONOMA is its carefully crafted sense of structure. Sounds appear, echo through empty space, and dissolve, allowing silence to become part of the composition. It’s a beautifully restrained work of ambient composition that demonstrates Hirano’s mastery of both classical harmony and modern electronic sound design. – GS
Ishmael Ali – Burn The Plastic, Sell The Copper
Cellist and guitarist Ishmael Ali brings a charismatic and tuneful spin to the avant-garde on Burn The Plastic, Sell The Copper. The record is rooted in Chicago’s intergenerational improvising community. Reflected, Refracted opens in fractured lyric mode. Thematic fragments bounce between players and gradually cohere into a knotty, song-like figure. The Cut and the Turn leans more jagged with rhythmic feints and sudden drops. It feels like physical choreography you can almost see. Stars In My Pocket stretches into a six-plus-minute mini epic. Its melodic seed is passed around the ensemble and reshaped, yet always recognisable. Fear Chased Hope In Tight Circles balances tension and uplift. It runs skittering rhythms under long, singing lines. Everness and Pastiche play with contrast. One feels patient and meditative, while the other is quick-change and collage-like. Closer On Nights of the Full Moon, He Dreamed of Buffalo reads like a short story in sound. It is cinematic, slightly surreal, and unexpectedly tender. The record stays approachable even at its most abstract. That accessibility comes from Ali’s melodic instinct and the band’s shared language. – IA
Max Kutner – Rogue Lash
NYC-based composer, producer, and multi-instrumentalist Max Kutner returns to Orenda Records for his latest album. Born out of a prolonged hiatus from live performance, the album began life as a large chamber ensemble concept before evolving into a “one-man big band” experiment. Recording from home using sample libraries, guitars, basses, keyboards, and drum machines, while stitching together remote collaborations with musicians spanning New York City, Los Angeles, Oakland, Portland, and Boston, Kutner also took the helm as his own mixing and mastering engineer for the first time. The result is a project that feels both intimately personal and sprawling in its creative scope. Over its ambitious 70-minute runtime, Rogue Lash refuses to sit still, moving fluidly between funk, industrial, metal, and drone while using repetition and groove as the connective tissue holding it all together. The listening experience is hypnotic and deeply textural, but Kutner layers something sharper beneath the surface: a satirical, socio-philosophical commentary on life in New York City, translating his observations of people, places, and everyday phenomena into sound with a wry, knowing sensibility. It’s a joy to listen to this! – AR
Resavoir – Themes For Dreams
Themes For Dreams feels like another deliberate swerve, catching Chicago musician‑composer‑producer Will Miller in a quieter mood. The record moves with a kind of meditative patience, its 13 pieces drifting in slow arcs rather than driving forward. By stripping away drums entirely, Miller leans into melody as a mood‑shaping force, lines that hover, dissolve, and return like half‑remembered thoughts. It’s music built to soften the edges of a day. Even in its sparseness, the album carries the collaborative DNA that’s always animated Miller’s work. The cast is stellar with Marta Sofia Honer, Jeremiah Chiu, Macie Stewart, Matt Gold, William Corduroy, Molly Rife, and more adding their huge talents to the record. Their contributions feel less like features and more like gentle presences, deepening the album’s sense of warmth and shared space. It’s a record too varied to box in, yet its fusion of airy ambient tones, new‑age warmth, and jazz‑tinted colour gives it a distinct identity, deepened by the graceful sweep of sax, viola, pedal steel, cello, and violin. Get your headphones, hit play and let its quiet generosity do its work. – CFS
Huw Marc Bennett – Heol Las
With Heol Las, Huw Marc Bennett creates a record that feels deeply rooted yet constantly in motion, drawing from the folk traditions of South Wales and reshaping them with jazz looseness, psychedelic texture, and a producer’s instinct for atmosphere. Rather than treating archival melodies like museum pieces, Bennett gives them breath and momentum, letting these old forms move through earthy grooves, acoustic detail, and subtly expansive arrangements. The result is music that feels both reverent and alive, rich with place but never boxed in by it. Two of the album’s most telling moments show just how immersive and distinctive this record is. ‘Y Fedwen (The Birch)’ stands out immediately, with Angela Christofilou’s vocal adding a haunting clarity to Bennett’s warm, hypnotic backdrop. At the same time, ‘Carol Haf (Summer Carol)’ opens the album with a gently unfolding sense of ritual, setting the tone with patience and understated beauty. What makes Heol Las so compelling is how naturally it bridges tradition and reinvention, turning regional folk memory into something vivid, soulful, and quietly transportive. – WBS
