* Edition of 100 copies * Chant is the starting point. Not chant as decoration or as a mood, but late medieval chant as a compositional problem, taken up by someone working alone with a bass clarinet, a piccolo, her own voice and a rack of analogue electronics. Emily Rach Beisel has described what drew her to it: music from before the rules hardened, with a wild freedom and density that later codification would take away. Multiple voices, as she puts it, "both intertwined and independent." Which raises the obvious difficulty. Polyphony needs more than one body. Beisel toured this material through Spring 2025 before recording it, working out how a single performer might hold several independent lines at once, and the answer arrived at here is not a trick of overdubbing so much as a way of playing that keeps splitting itself. On Cantilevers, lines stretch out past their supports and overlap without ever arriving anywhere together - she was reading Danielewski's House Of Leaves at the time and thinking about a labyrinth that cannot structurally exist. The piece opens with a rapid stutter and then breaks into interference patterns that bellow and throw off sparks.

The low end is where Beisel's reputation was built, and it earns it again here. Multilayered bass clarinet, thick enough to pass for an organ or an amplifier stack, owing as much to doom metal as to Eliane Radigue. But heaviness on this record is not always loud. Hollow Ships works a single malevolent hum that thickens like fog rolling in, and it gets under the skin more effectively than anything that shouts. Her Still Singing Limbs is built entirely from flute, piercing tones and choppy fragments colliding above a knocking percussive figure that feels ritual rather than rhythmic. Elsewhere the electronics veer closer to Sun Ra at the keyboard than to any drone orthodoxy.

The titles keep pointing outward. Introit is the opening of the Mass, and Guillaume de Machaut's La Messe de Nostre Dame sits behind the whole project; Hollow Ships lifts a formula straight out of Homer, by way of Emily Wilson's recent translation of the Iliad. The closing title track brings that early music inheritance fully into the open, a layered elegy that answers the opening rather than resolving it.

Beisel holds a Master of Music from Northwestern, works as a theatre reed player and educator, and founded the Pleiades Series at Elastic Arts in 2021, a monthly platform for femme, trans and nonbinary improvisers. She was named a 3Arts Awardee in Music in 2024. This is her second solo album, following Particle Of Organs for the same label in 2023, recorded over two days at Marmalade by Bill Harris, mastered by Edward Hamel, with artwork by mrfox.img.

Black vinyl, edition of 100.