James McKain, Damon Smith, Weasel Walter

Seeing the Way the Mole Tunnels documents a striking collaboration between three restless figures in contemporary free improvisation: James McKain (baritone saxophone), Damon Smith (double bass) and Weasel Walter (drums). Since joining forces in early 2024, McKain’s extension of Chicago and Brooklyn gestural tradition finds a home alongside Smith and Walter’s ongoing partnership—a duo known for navigating the unstable ground between tactile violence and fragile restraint. The album unfolds as a set of energetic episodes, recorded both live and in studio environments. Each piece resists formula, foregrounding the trio’s dedication to genuine risk. McKain’s reed work zigzags between splintered phrasing and persistent burrowing—a sonic analogy to the tunneling that gives the project its name. Smith, whose bass alternates between resonance and frenzy, focuses and challenges the ensemble’s direction with punctuating gestures and sharply defined attacks. Walter’s percussion is surgical in its unpredictability, launching bursts of texture one moment and giving way to brittle silence the next. The textures change rapidly throughout—sometimes crowded and insistent, sometimes hovering on the edge of collapse. The group’s willingness to let tension linger, or to overturn expectations with sudden turns and fractures, mirrors the movements of the unseen mole, carving out new routes beneath the landscape. The result is music that feels continuous yet full of discontinuity, where surface volatility is always underpinned by form and purpose.