The Lot for January
New year, New Lot website + Richard Youngs, Jessica Williams, Harry Christelis, E Ruscha V & Fabiano Nascemento
It’s been roughly 85 days since my last appearance on The Lot, due to the specific timing of holidays across November and December. In that time, The Lot revamped its website and interface. So in lieu of a YouTube embed, you can now visit the page itself, with a full tracklisting to boot! Less typing for me. A Soundcloud link here:
And some Listening Notes below:
Richard Youngs - Hidden
Richard Youngs is a bit of a curious figure for me. For as often as I’m awestruck by his output and compositions, I’m also overwhelmed and sodden by it. A little goes a long way for me. Which might also double as his motto in his compositions: take a small handful of things, sustain them across time, and make magic (maybe) of them. Or as his Bandcamp puts it, he’s “possessed of the ‘bloody-minded’ dedication to ‘having an idea and sticking with it.’”
To be fair, it’s hard to deeply assess Youngs’s loooong body of work. First heard Advent and Festival and Georgians back in the college days. (How many volumes of Foot Guitar can any human being wade through?) The ones I know best, like Advent, Sapphie (+ Hypnotic Brass Ensemble’s bold reimagining of that album), Boredom Of Poetry, a few other CDR ones he dropped across the ‘00s, are both awe-filled and grating, depending entirely on the mood.
Hidden is his third Black Truffle release. On the one hand, Hidden sounds like a studio album hearkening back to some of his early late ‘90s explorations, but it also feels like a brief stop before soldering on to whatever is next. It’s but one of five albums to see release in 2025, making me think of Youngs output as more diaristic than anything else. Auditioning “Hidden II” –a deliriously long accumulation of squiggly synths, twanging guitar echoes, garbled voices on tape, slow claps, breathy flute– on a long flight, it settled on me like a fog. Don’t think I’ve even spent time with “Hidden I” yet.
Jessica Williams - Blue Abstraction: Prepared Piano Project 1985–1987
An incredible archival release that snuck in near the end of 2025. I had encountered Williams’s 1981 album Orgonomic Music at Billy’s Record Salon (RIP) one day, but passed on it for some reason. And only later did I learn of her pedigree as house pianist at San Francisco’s Keystone Korner, meaning she played weekly with all of the greats:Dexter Gordon, Stan Getz, Tony Williams, Charlie Haden, and Bobby Hutcherson (to name just a few). Meanwhile, her own discography topped 75 albums, most of them coming out on CD in the ‘90s.
While Williams passed away in 2022, it seems the broader public is slowly catching up to her. Perhaps it’s as a trans icon? She received gender-affirming surgery back in 1976, making her a pioneer in much the same way as Beverly Glenn-Copeland. But it’s the music, ultimately. In 2024, Modern Harmonic reissued Orgonomic Music. And now follows Blue Abstraction: Prepared Piano Project 1985–1987.
I can’t quite tell what or where Blue Abstraction arose from. Did these recordings ever get released in any form? According to release notes, there were three years of this type of experimentation in the studio, before it was ultimately put away. It apparently stems from a deep dive into Thelonious Monk and reveling in his visceral, jagged stylings. Or maybe his freeing insight that “The piano ain’t got no wrong notes” that inspired her to go deeply into this unknown sonic terrain. But what led Williams to also start incorporating prepared piano stylings into her playing is a mystery. Yes, there were predecessors like John Cage and Henry Cowell (I don’t think her piece here “The Banshee” corresponds to Cowell’s own early prepared piano explorations, but maybe it echoes it?) But her approach feels far different. The chops, the melodic sense, the Monk-like play between dissonance and harmony is sharp here.
According to the album page, she described these recordings as “temporal arrangements of sound and timbre... my self encoded on a chrome oxide surface [audio tape]…[a] further investigation into my becoming.” Noisy, elegant, astonishing, playful, the collection continues to surprise me. This month’s show featured the tour de force “Half Circle Song” vacillates between Meade Lux Lewis boogie woogie, homemade gamelan clanging, and an alien musical language that still feels light years beyond human understanding.
Harry Christelis – Preserving Fictions
I both ignore most press releases and yet am a sucker for press release language. Which means that I both believe there is no way that London-based guitarist Harry Christelis’s forthcoming album Preserving Fictions is really going to live up to the godlike comparisons in the press release to “Talk Talk’s Laughing Stock, In A Silent Way-era Miles Davis…and John Martyn’s ‘Small Hours,’” but at the same time I’m pretty much guaranteed to audition anything that gets triangulated in such a way.
But it sounds pretty good on first pass. Some luminous, early Bill Frisell-like ruminations on ECM at times. Two tunes stuck out: “Wood Dalling” with its brushed cymbal work and muted trumpet breath plus the more percussive “Djemebe.” In the studio, I asked my DJ partner to pick one and she liked the percussive undulations of the latter, so that’s what we went with. Out next month.
Fabiano Do Nascimento & E Ruscha V - Aquáticos
Like so many things, an interview conducted with Eddie Ruscha back in 2012 for the MTV website no longer exists. At the time, I was mystified by a tune he cut called “The Rose,” and I’ve been a fan of his music in the ensuing dozen years that have passed. But in the past few years, Ruscha’s collaborative work has opened up his sound in a way that offset his solo efforts growing more inward. There was a zoned out duo exchange with Peter Zummo, Thinking A View, and now a cool dialogue with guitarist, Fabiano Do Nascimento, emerges, the first 2026 release on Music From Memory.
Nascimento is no stranger to the duo dialogue himself, dropping cool exchanges with Sam Gendel and Japanese guitarist Shin Sasakubo the past few years. The Ruscha-Nascimento collab stretches back to the early pandemic days of 2020, but nothing on the beautiful, sun-kissed tunes of Aquáticos suggest long gestation, extra fiddling, or over-baking the sounds. The hushed drum machine patter of Ruscha and Nascimento’s deft nylon string melodies mesh easily, with just enough dub FX to make it drift. It all moves at an unhurried pace. Deep in the throes of a winter storm, it’s worth a spin now and saved for the summer months, should those ever arrive.