Together, Walsh and Crompton are Anagrams, and their debut album together, Blue Voices, might initially seem like a departure from Balmat’s habitually electronic terrain. It’s not ambient music, but it’s also not not ambient music, at least to listeners in the right frame of mind. The two musicians, who met when Walsh moved from Brooklyn to Atlanta in 2016 and began collaborating a few years later, see the music in similarly ambiguous terms. “I like it because it’s not jazz,” jokes Crompton, a veteran and credentialed jazz player. “And JD likes it because it’s jazz.”
Across the album’s 11 tracks, there are faint echoes of familiar touchstones: the atmospheric twang of Daniel Lanois’ pedal steel on Apollo: Atmospheres and Soundtracks; the mercurial modal runs of Ethio-jazz; the late-summer calm of Fuubutsushi; the versatility of players and composers like Patrick Shiroishi and Sam Gendel, who are asking similar questions about where jazz ends and some other, nameless territory begins. Mostly, though, what Blue Voices captures is the quixotic sound of two restless musical imaginations making it up as they go along, two voices discovering a shared language in a hitherto unexplored shade of blue.
Eve Maret is a Nashville-based experimental artist and composer who employs a wide array of electronic media and techniques in her various disciplines, exploring the possibilities of personal and communal healing through creative action. To Eve, the act of creating is a wholehearted “Yes.” She is devoted to creating and performing in a way that is inherently artful, emotionally raw, and transcendent. Drawing inspiration from nineteenth-century orchestral and choral works, the Fluxus movement, Kosmische Musik and funk, Eve makes use of digital and modular synthesizers, a vocoder, clarinet, electric bass, guitar, and field recordings to create works that range from lush cinematic compositions to space disco. Eve’s music practice is a conversation with her numerous curiosities, manifested in the form of video art, drawing, dance, ritual, and cymatics.
Eve has performed across the United States alongside artists such as Matmos, Guerilla Toss, Xiu Xiu, JEFF the Brotherhood, Lydia Lunch, and Sun Araw. Eve’s 2019 release, No More Running (Deluxe Edition), was reviewed by The Wire Magazine and was featured on Bandcamp’s Album of the Day series. She is hailed to present “a loving tribute to her community, maintained by a distinct, individual voice that’s impossible to ignore” (Bandcamp, USA). Eve’s music has been featured on Echoes Radio and Iggy Pop’s BBC radio show Iggy Confidential. “Synthesizer Hearts,” off of Eve’s 2020 release, Stars Aligned, appeared on BBC Radio 6 Music’s B-List in December 2020 and premiered on Mary Anne Hobbs’ BBC Radio show “Music From The Near Future.” In 2021, Eve contributed to Moebius Strips, an audio installation and compilation album honoring the work of electronic music pioneer Dieter Moebius. Other contributors include Geoff Barrow (Portishead, Beak), Sarah Davachi, Jean-Benoît Dunckel (Air), Mark Mothersbaugh (Devo), Phew, Hans-Joachim Roedelius (Cluster, Harmonia), Michael Rother (Harmonia, NEU!) and Yuri Suzuki.
Michael Hix is a composer and musician from Tennessee. His music incorporates synthesizers and electronics to build dynamic structures that evolve over time, delving into the human condition and the metaphysical dimension. His work draws upon classical minimalism, sacred music, analog techno & house as well as popular music. He lives and works in Nashville.
‘Composer, musician and Nashville Ambient Ensemble leader Michael Hix fell in love with experimental electronic music in the early 2000s, when avant-garde guru William Basinski’s The Disintegration Loops came out. The four-volume series “blew my mind,’ says Hix, who was a student at Belmont at the time. ‘Basinski was a big inspiration to me because he’d built up this big community in Brooklyn in his loft, which he called Arcadia. I felt like if I moved to New York, I could build that kind of thing there.’
Hix left Music City for New York City in 2011. He lived there seven years, and might’ve stayed if he hadn’t become a father at the end of 2018. During his earlier tenure in Nashville, Hix hadn’t managed to make inroads into the city’s experimental music scene, so on returning home with his wife and son, he was pleasantly surprised at what he found. ‘I knew I’d be reconnecting with old friends,’ he says, ‘but I met so many new people making amazing music.’” - Nashville Scene