Other Music on Tate Eskew

Top 35 Albums of 2025

Tue, 30 Dec 2025 17:26:15 +0000

Lucy Gooch – Desert Window Listen/Purchase
Desert Window sits somewhere between folk song and dream logic. Lucy Gooch’s layered vocals and soft electronics recall mid-era Björk and Kate Bush at their most exploratory, but scaled way down and turned inward. It’s quiet, patient music that opens up the longer you stay with it. Maybe my favorite album of the year.

Ron Heglin – Tom Djll – Duos for Voice and Runglers Listen/Purchase
A standout for me this year, Duos for Voice and Runglers feels like two signals meeting in fog, neither fully translating the other. Ron Heglin’s voice bends and mutates like a half-remembered language while Tom Djll’s runglers spark, stutter, and short-circuit around it. The result is a fragile truce between flesh and machine, hovering just long enough to leave a trace.

Friendship – Caveman Wakes Up Listen/Purchase
Caveman Wakes Up feels like sunlight hitting stone for the first time, followed by a sideways grin. Friendship writes songs that wander with intent, full of sharp observation, dry humor, and melodies that feel casually worn but carefully placed. It’s deeply smart music that pretends not to be, unfolding at its own unhurried pace.

Daniel Knox – Mercado 48 Listen/Purchase
Mercado 48 unfolds in hushed piano figures and a voice that sounds weary but steady. Daniel Knox writes with a rare clarity about isolation, doubt, and endurance, touching the human condition without grand statements or sentimentality. The restraint gives the songs their weight and staying power.

The Bats – Corner Coming Up Listen/Purchase
Corner Coming Up lands as another quiet affirmation from a band that has always trusted small gestures. The Bats sound completely at ease here, writing songs that feel modest on the surface but deeply assured underneath. For longtime listeners, it’s comforting without being nostalgic, proof that their instincts are still intact.

James McMurtry – The Black Dog and The Wandering Boy Listen/Purchase
The Black Dog and the Wandering Boy shows James McMurtry operating at full strength, sharp, unsentimental, and quietly funny in the way only truly smart writing can be. “Sons of the Second Sons” stands as one of the year’s best songs and one of the finest he has written, cutting deep while keeping its balance. The record carries that same mix of wit, moral clarity, and hard-earned perspective throughout.

Mike Majikowski – Invisible Listen/Purchase
Invisible centers on double bass, but it breathes and drifts like the best ambient music. Mike Majkowski lets tones emerge, recede, and blur at the edges, turning resonance and silence into equal partners. It’s deeply physical music that listens as much as it speaks, slow-moving and quietly absorbing.

Sean McCann – The Leopard Listen/Purchase
The Leopard is a meticulously constructed opera that dissolves narrative into sound, voice, and hallucinated detail. Sean McCann moves between radio play, ritual, and dream logic, letting scenes eat themselves and reform in slow, uncanny cycles. It’s immersive and disorienting work that rewards surrender more than interpretation.

Greet Death – Die In Love Listen/Purchase
Die In Love finds Greet Death settling into their weight, writing with more patience and intention than before. The songs feel sturdier and more self-aware, as if the band has learned how to stand inside the noise rather than push against it. Even so, the record suggests a horizon just beyond reach, making their growth feel both earned and unfinished.

Little Mazarn – Mustang Island Listen/Purchase
Mustang Island moves with a restless curiosity, its songs leaning into landscape and memory without ever settling into easy answers. Little Mazarn blends warm acoustic elements with unusual rhythmic and sonic shifts, creating music that feels lived-in and thoughtful. There’s a sense of wandering here, like watching light change over a place you think you know and realizing you only just arrived.

John Camp – Proceed Listen/Purchase
Proceed is precise and unpretentious, built from clean lines and patient movement. John Camp shapes sound with purpose, letting patterns emerge and shift without excess. His guitar playing is great as per usual and the result is music that feels both thoughtful and deliberate, rewarding close attention and lingering in the quiet between notes.

Aiko Takahashi – The Grass Harp Listen/Purchase
Small piano figures surface and disappear, never insisting on themselves. What Aiko Takahashi builds here is less about melody than attention, a slow tuning of the ear to touch, breath, and residue. The Grass Harp rewards patience by quietly changing how you listen, even after it ends.

Sally Anne Morgan – Second Circle The Horizon Listen/Purchase
Circling rather than advancing, the music moves like a body finding its own pace again. Sally Anne Morgan lets fiddle, banjo, and subtle textures trace slow arcs that feel shaped by weather, breath, and repetition. Second Circle The Horizon listens closely to cycles rather than moments, rewarding attention to how things return slightly changed.

Chrome Chasm – The Hermit Listen/Purchase
Long, patient passages stretch out and slowly shift, built from guitars, pedal steel, and soft brass that bleed into each other. Chrome Chasm favors atmosphere over momentum, letting pieces change almost imperceptibly. The Hermit works best when you stop looking for direction and let the sound settle in around you as if you were listening to the best of Philip Glass.

Mekons – Horror Listen/Purchase
Horror finds the long-running The Mekons doing what they’ve always done best: taking serious ideas and letting them breathe through rough-edged, restless music. Lyrics jump from historical reckoning to present-day malaise, and multiple voices shift the focus like a conversation that won’t settle for easy answers. The result is an album that’s both pointed and surprisingly warm, full of sharp critique and the band’s lived-in sense of collective strength, and it underlines why they’re still vital after all these decades.

Tropical Fuck Storm – Fairyland Codex Listen/Purchase
Fairyland Codex feels like a controlled delirium, raw edges and strange turns unfolding with brutal clarity. Tropical Fuck Storm blends noise, melody, satire, and bleak humor in ways that never feel accidental or sloppy. For a band that seems capable of anything, this record pushes their restless inventiveness into sharper focus without losing the off-kilter charm that makes them so amazing. They can do no wrong in my book.

Schatterau – Übers Jahr Listen/Purchase
Quiet, seasonal, and attentive, this record moves at a human pace. Schatterau works with field recordings, piano, and soft electronics in a way that feels observational rather than expressive, documenting time passing rather than dramatizing it. Übers Jahr rewards repeated listening, not through revelation, but through familiarity slowly deepening.

Pale Blue Eyes – New Place Listen/Purchase
Built with their own hands and clearly trusted, the songs settle in without strain. Pale Blue Eyes let guitars, synths, and steady rhythms lock together naturally, nothing overthought or undercut. New Place proves how rare it is to self-record and still sound this sure of yourself.

Chris Brokaw – Ghost Ship Listen/Purchase
Keeping up with my friend Chris Brokaw almost feels beside the point. He writes like someone taking notes while moving through the world, attentive and unsentimental. Ghost Ship drifts between memory and presence, songs arriving worn but intact, carrying the quiet authority of someone who has lived inside the questions long enough to stop explaining them.

Shiner – Believemeyou Listen/Purchase
The songs hit like well-placed turns in a familiar road, nothing wasted and nothing rushed. Shiner locks smart melodies into tightly wound structures, letting tension and release do the talking, just as they've done for decades now. Believeyoume sounds seasoned rather than softened, proof that precision and feeling do not cancel each other out.

Thor & Friends – Heathen Spirituals Listen/Purchase
Heathen Spirituals unfolds as three long instrumental movements that feel meditative yet charged, like ritual music pulled from a minimalist dream. The ensemble builds from simple marimba lines into layered sound worlds where cello drones, winds, and even a wordless choir give weight to every shift. Recorded live in an empty auditorium, the music moves slowly but insistently, a kind of spacious, hymn-like ambient work that suggests both quiet reflection and something approaching awe.

Lathe of Heaven – Aurora Listen/Purchase
This one hit me right away and stayed there because of the guitar lines and vocal melodies that many Flock of Seagulls fans will love. Lathe of Heaven has a real feel for mood and melody here, songs that glow and fray at the edges without losing their center. Aurora already feels strong and considered, and it also makes me excited to hear what happens when they tighten the screws just a bit more next time.

Ben McElroy – Elkwort Listen/Purchase
Elkwort feels less like a composed record and more like something overheard. Breath, bow scrape, and wheezing organ drift in and out, never settling long enough to become comfortable. There is a rural, almost medicinal quality to it, as if these sounds were gathered rather than written. It rewards patience, not with big moments, but with a sense of being quietly altered by the time it ends.

Eli Winter – A Trick Of The Light Listen/Purchase
This record is Eli Winter stepping fully into himself. The playing is open and generous, curious without showing off, and confident enough to let ideas breathe. It moves easily between folk, jazz, and abstraction, but always sounds grounded and human.

The Necks – Disquiet Listen/Purchase
Disquiet tests your patience and rewards it in equal measure. This is the record where The Necks unapologetically take up more than three hours of your life with slowly unfolding, improvisational terrain that feels alive and weathered at the same time. It’s hypnotic without being easy, mysterious without being opaque, and when it clicks it feels like you are breathing the same air as these three.

Jogging House – Kiosk Listen/Purchase
Kiosk is Jogging House in a slightly sunnier mood, where loopy tape fragments and hazy melodies feel personal and gentle rather than shadowy. The whole thing was built by chopping up tape loops and running them through a sampler and modular gear, then recording straight to tape in live takes, which gives it an unguarded, human energy.

The Ex – If Your Mirror Breaks Listen/Purchase
This one feels less like confrontation and more like communion. The Ex still clang and surge, but there’s a warmth under the abrasion, a sense of people listening hard to each other while the world rattles outside. The songs feel handmade and a little crooked, full of motion, humor, and unease. Strange music that somehow leaves you steadier than when you started.

Water Damage – Live At Le Guess Who? Listen/Purchase
This record is less like a performance and more like a condition you submit to. Water Damage lock into a single idea and refuse to blink, pushing repetition until it turns viscous and hallucinatory. Time stretches, details warp, and what starts as brute force slowly becomes meditative. Music as pressure system. Simple in the best way, smart in how long it holds.

Old Saw – The Wringing Cloth Listen/Purchase
The recording here from Old Saw feels quietly unsettled, like folk music remembering something it would rather not. Old Saw stretch familiar acoustic shapes until they thin out and blur, leaving space where certainty used to live. Nothing here rushes, nothing insists. It just hangs in the air, damp and unresolved, and somehow feels truer for it.

Michael Grigoni * Pan•American – New World, Lonely Ride Listen/Purchase
New World, Lonely Ride is a road trip at sunrise with no destination, just the hum of asphalt and the slow bloom of atmosphere around you. Michael Grigoni and Pan•American weave distant electronics, sparse guitar, and field recordings into something both expansive and intimate. It’s not beat-driven. It’s mood-driven, a study in space where silence counts as much as sound. A lonely ride that somehow feels like company when you need it.

Ancient Death – Ego Dissolution Listen/Purchase
Not a lot of metal on the list this year, but Ego Dissolution is a stand-out. The riffs and rhythms are steeped in tradition yet feel alive and unpredictable, like old school mechanics running through an cosmic filter. It's an album that sounds like it’s wrestling with its own shadow and winning.

Piers Faccini & Ballaké Sissoko – When The Word Was Song Listen/Purchase
This recording exemplifies music from before music was separated into styles. Voice, guitar, and kora move with an easy gravity, each note chosen, nothing wasted. It’s intimate without being fragile, ancient without feeling precious. Songs as shared memory, passed hand to hand, still warm when you receive them.

Cheer-Accident – Admission Listen/Purchase
Admission feels like a band that never lost the joy of surprise. Cheer-Accident twist and pivot with gleeful unpredictability, leaping from jagged art-rock hooks to jazz-tinged turns and oddball harmonies that land just when you think you know the road they’re on. It’s smart without being precious, strange without being alienating, and full of moments that make you both grin and scratch your head. An album that rewards curiosity and refuses to sit still. They've reached Thinking Plague status I think.

Seabuckthorn – A Path Within A Path Listen/Purchase
Do you want to listen for direction rather than following one? Put this in your headphones, then. Much like other Seabuckthorn records, the sounds arrive lightly, guitar, bowed strings, fragments of air and place, each leaving a trace before moving on. Nothing here insists on meaning, yet everything feels intentional. It’s music that trusts the listener to wander, to notice, and to find their own way through it.

tree // nature – Triple Heart Chamber and Dancing Mechanical Tree Listen/Purchase
Long drones stack, phase, and grind until repetition stops feeling passive and starts feeling structural, almost architectural. You can hear the mechanics working, oscillations nudging against each other, time stretching and folding in on itself. It’s visceral because of the volume and density, analytical because the process is always exposed. Music that doesn’t soothe so much as recalibrate your nervous system.

Top 35 Records of 2024

Fri, 13 Dec 2024 23:48:15 +0000

First Ten Standouts

Alan Licht – Havens listen/purchase
I’m not sure what else needs to be said about Alan and his guitar music. This new album explores repetition and subtle morphing pieces that will fill you with goodwill.
I4A – I4A 3 listen/purchase
I4A continues to fly under the radar making “dishwashing music” that shows an immense amount of maturity through smart composition and ideas that are modern sharp takes with Traffic and Kraut origins, but somehow wholly different.
Läuten der Seele – Die Reise zur Monsalwäsche listen/purchase
This is the final installment of Christian Schoppik’s “Water” trilogy. The first two showing up on this yearly list in the past as well. He makes beautiful collages that don’t get long in the tooth or introduce boredom.
Wussy – Cincinatti Ohio listen/purchase
As a fellow Midwesterner, this record is almost achingly too on the nose. Wussy continues to write music that immediately shows that they’ve listened deeply to thousands of records and they are able to relay their existence through your speakers.
Nala Sinephro – Endlessness listen/purchase
This is what happens when you have an ear for a journey and surround yourself with great musicians. If Broadcast wanted to make a record with mid-era Miles, you’d find something like this on the tape.
Jeff Parker ETA IVtet – The Way Out of Easy listen/purchase
An album that has an immediate impact on first listen and still gives upon repeated listening. Which is exactly what Jeff, Anna, Jay, and Josh are doing in the room together…listening.
METZ – Up On Gravity Hill listen/purchase
For me, this is METZ finally delivering the melody that I knew they were capable of, without losing the raw power that they somehow deliver in trio form. This will pummel you from start to finish…and you’ll immediately replay it in its entirety.
Mount Eerie – Night Palace listen/purchase
I think perhaps Phil has finally made an album that is the essence of what he truly is as an artist/human. It’s all here, everything he’s embodied over the last decades. Introspective, quaint, fuzzy, cloudy, and abrupt.
Blood Incantation – Absolute Elsewhere listen/purchase
This is the best death metal band going and this is the best record they’ve made to date. Obviously they’ve been deep diving into the German ambient crates and it has imprinted itself into their approach. This is gigantic and sprawling. Take your time.
Merope – V?jula listen/purchase
This is a beautiful album of recordings rooted in Lithuanian folk music, but tied together through the ancient and modernity. It’s perfectly paced and the emotions communicated are easily received. As artists, we only hope we can fully realize our ideas like this.

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Top 35 Albums of 2023

Tue, 19 Dec 2023 04:56:57 +0000

First Ten Standouts

Pale Blue Eyes – This House listen/purchase
Layered melodic synth pop that recalls German motorik, Ulrich Schnauss production, and The Engineers – Always Returning era recordings
Scivic Rivers – S/T : listen/purchase
Kids don’t write albums like this. Mature finely crafted songs in the vein of Talk Talk’s later output and passing moments of Bob Welch Fleetwood Mac material
Jeannine Schulz – Pure : listen/purchase
Incredibly patient ambient micro-shifts of drift that feels completely organic
Lankum – False Lankum listen/purchase
Irish folk ensemble bringing drones and minimalism to out of this world melodies
Simon Joyner & The Echoes – One Carried A Lantern : listen/purchase
What else can be said about Simon? Inspired, practiced, and full of life lived songwriting
Blood Incantation – Luminescent Bridge : listen/purchase
Quite possibly the best death metal band going right now. Heavy, spacey, with ambient interludes
PJ Harvey – I Inside the Old Year Dying : listen/purchase
PJ and John Parish continue to do extraordinary things together. This album is maybe her darkest since Is This Desire?
Läuten der Seele – Ertrunken Im Seichtesten Gewässer : listen/purchase
If Christian releases an album every year…here it will be. Field recordings interspersed with very smart imaginative collage work
Ned Milligan – Considerable : listen/purchase
Quiet and delicate sounds that not only can get lost in the background of life, but overwhelm you with their intricacy when focused upon
Alberto Lizarralde – Haizetxe : listen/purchase
Collection of unreleased pieces from the maestro himself recorded in Basque on a 4 track reel to reel

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Top 35 Albums of 2022

Tue, 20 Dec 2022 05:07:56 +0000

There were a lot of amazing albums released this year. As per usual, I’ve spent countless hours engulfed in new releases along with the albums of the past that I love. I couldn’t possibly list everything I listened to this year that I thought was worth sharing, but I’m going to list thirty-five albums here that really connected with me this year. I listened to all of these albums a lot this year and these were the ones that I was often returning to in times of not deep diving into back catalogs. These are in no particular order, but I will say that the first ten albums I have listed here are real standouts for me this year!

Top 25 Records of 2021

Tue, 28 Dec 2021 22:00:09 +0000

As I do every year, I wanted to share my favorite albums/recordings from this past year. There are 25 recordings here that I really connected with throughout the year. These are in no particular order and I’m putting a link to each one of these albums in case you want to have a listen or purchase these records directly from the artist or their label.

Orla Wren – The Blind Deaf Stone – listen/buy
Eleventh Dream Day – Since Grazed – listen/buy
Kryshe – Neuron – listen/buy
Sunburned Hand of the Man – Pick A Day To Die – listen/buy
Cucina Povera – Lumme – listen/buy
Low – HEY WHAT – listen/buy
Mega Bog – Life, and Another – listen/buy
marine eyes – idyll – listen/buy
Alastair Galbraith – loss – listen/buy
Steel Bearing Hand – Slay In Hell – listen/buy
Tomáš Knoflí?ek – Vaguely Delimited Targets – listen/buy
Tropical Fuck Storm – Deep States – listen/buy
Green-House – Music for Living Spaces – listen/buy
Clearing – Grow – listen/buy
Peter Broderick – The Wind That Shakes The Bramble – listen/buy
Hathor’s Rose Choir – Hathor’s Rose Choir – listen/buy
Knife Crime – Lovely Gary – listen/buy
Lucy Gooch – Rains Break EP – listen/buy
Andrew Tuttle & Padang Food Tigers – A Cassowary Apart – listen/buy
Black Swan – Repetition Hymns – listen/buy
Sarah Davachi – Antiphonals – listen/buy
Forest Robots – Horst & Graben – listen/buy
Jogging House – Flaws – listen/buy
Moral Collapse – Moral Collapse – listen/buy
Francis M. Gri – Stille – listen/buy

Latest happenings…

Tue, 18 Sep 2012 15:32:52 +0000

It’s been quite some time since I have updated here. There’s been a lot going on and I’ve been trying to stay focused on the projects in the hopper.
Over the last 10 months or so, here are some things that have been going on.

I recorded a 10″ record with Nashville natives, Ttotals. It is called “Silver on Black” and you can take a listen and buy it here:

We also recorded two new songs for a 7″ series that will be put out by Sonic Cathedral. One of the songs will be selected by the label and then mastered by Sonic Boom from Spacemen 3 for release.

New Project…The Peasant Revolt – Calling Out

Fri, 24 Jun 2011 14:09:36 +0000

About three and half years ago, I spoke with Caldwell, from The Bubblegum Complex, about doing a record together and it really never panned out as we got caught up with life. With my new record in the bag and set to be released this Autumn, I’ve been starting other projects with people and I thought now is as good a time as any to see if Caldwell wanted to ease back into doing some songs. Caldwell is recovering from surgery in Mississippi so we couldn’t really get together in my studio to record some new stuff, so what we did was started with an acoustic track that Caldwell had hastily recorded to get his idea down. He was having trouble writing a lyric and melody for the song…so I took a stab. In the end, I only ended up doing the vocal/lyric and adding a mellotron to the track that has a huge pre-delay reverb out to a delay. I cleaned up the track a little frequency-wise and here is what we have…our first attempt at collaboration. We plan on doing more of this and hopefully, once Caldwell has recovered, we’ll be able to write and record a whole noise-filled record together here in Nashville. For now, you’ll probably see tracks pop up here and there on this site.

Patrick Krief – Zero Art Session – Recorded Live to 2-track on May 3rd, 2007

Sat, 29 Jan 2011 15:30:36 +0000

A few years ago I had the pleasure of sitting in my studio with my friend, Patrick Krief, and recording the 4 songs below. He was in town performing with his band, The Dears, and we were able to get some time before the show to knock these recordings out. We recorded live to 2-track using a single microphone and ate some brownies after the session. Patrick is a passionate musician and I think it really comes through in these performances.

Philip Glass – Train/Spaceship Parts 1 & 2 from Einstein on the Beach

Mon, 06 Dec 2010 14:31:03 +0000

There aren’t too many times in my life where I’ve felt completely overwhelmed and engulfed by a live music environment. When those times hit and the goosebumps don’t go away, I remember why I started playing music in the first place. A couple of years ago my wife, Amy, got us tickets to see Philip Glass: A Retrospective to celebrate his 70th birthday at the Schermerhorn Symphony Center here in Nashville. We were very excited to see a group of musicians play some Philip Glass music. When we arrived at the symphony hall, we had no idea what was in store for us. It turns out that it wasn’t just a “group of musicians” that were to play, but Philip himself and his original ensemble. I can’t explain the feelings that coursed through me that night as I swam inside of every detail. I felt nervous, full of anxiety, incredibly happy, and incredibly sad as I was lulled in and out of twisting arpeggios. You don’t so much listen to Philip and his ensemble as you perhaps live inside of their cacophony of life. It was one of my favorite experiences that I’ve encountered in my life. Period.