Ezra Feinberg’s third album Soft Power sees the composer-guitarist enlist an impressive array of fellow musicians including Mary Lattimore, David Moore (Bing & Ruth), Jefre Cantu-Ledesma, and Robbie Lee. Defined by its abundance of melodies, repeating figures and ecstatic improvisations, Soft Power exudes an enlightened and transformative spirit to empower the listener. Feinberg, a practicing psychoanalyst and former founding member of the San Francisco psychedelic collective Citay (Dead Oceans / Important Records) resides in the artistic enclave of upstate New York’s Hudson River Valley. Initial recordings emerged in the late summer of 2020, before added synthesis with collaborator John Thayer (Arp, Sunwatchers) during early 2021. Soft Power follows previous albums Recumbent Speech (2020) and Pentimento And Others (2018). Feinberg artfully transcends the listener to an enriched place, his compositions distinguished by the deep humanity that lies at their core, plugging the listener into a state of wide eyed being, open and alive. Soft Power then is Feinberg’s own mantra but also one of power giving—a colourful catharsis translated into music. Feinberg’s music always speaks to the listener, but Soft Power, in whispering, speaks loudest.
LP $30.00
05/31/2024
***BACK IN STOCK!!! Received a 7.6 rating from Pitchfork. Recumbent Speech, Ezra Feinberg’s second album, opens with a lament. Named for the Robert Frost poem, “Acquainted with the Night” was written during one of the many devastating spectacles of injustice under our current regime. Repeating flutes and synths beam out of a low-end darkness, reflecting a collective sense of loss and alienation. Rising slowly, thickening with guitars and strings, “Acquainted with the Night” lifts off, and so too does the album from there. The second track, “Letter to my Mind,'' features the dynamic interplay of Feinberg's guitar with the loose and playful drumming of Tortoise's John McEntire, both pushing and pulling atop a looping bass figure. "Palms Up" begins with a lockstep pulse recalling early Terry Riley before jumping into an Ashra-like jam with Afrobeat accents. Side B opens with "Ovation," a tryptic with McEntire on drums which sets a wide lens onto a sweeping landscape, with soaring flutes, wordless vocals, and a hypnotic bassline played on a humming fretless that recalls classic ECM jazz-fusion. The piece plunges into an ambient, interior space before reemerging with a guitar solo fried through an old Space Echo effects processor, conjuring lidded Pompeii-era Pink Floyd. The album's title-track finale, "Recumbent Speech," features the magical pedal steel of Chuck Johnson. Unwinding atop a Balearic analog synth pattern, Feinberg stretches textures of Fender Rhodes and acoustic guitar around Johnson’s lyrical steel, with nods to Japanese ambient legend Hiroshi Yoshimura, as well as...
LP $18.35
06/26/2020
CD $14.75
06/26/2020
***BACK IN STOCK!!! EZRA FEINBERG, formerly of CITAY, is releses his debut solo album, Pentimento and Others via his imprint, Related States . After years of touring and several lauded releases on Dead Oceans and Important Records, Feinberg folded Citay in early 2012, relocated from San Francisco to Brooklyn, and stepped away from music. During this time he lost a close friend to cancer, someone who was an artistic mentor in Feinberg’s early days as a musician. He also got married, started a family, and, with mounting responsibilities, found himself questioning how to proceed with a life in music in the face of loss and with his years of freewheeling youth behind him. Through these seven tracks expansive landscapes unfold through cosmic layers of electric and acoustic guitars, pianos and synthesizers, all informed by ambient and new age hypnotics, 1970s West Coast psych, and the phase repetition of early New York minimalism, rounded out by a nod to West African acoustics. Feinberg and longtime producer and collaborator TIM GREEN (Joanna Newsom, Comets on Fire, Wand) have crafted long form pieces that take their time, seeking the pleasures and sorrows of the journey as well as the destination. Feinberg also recruited PETE GRANT, the legendary pedal steel player heard on records by The Grateful Dead, Guy Clark, and Tim Hardin to contribute soaring and plaintive textures to the album’s closer, “Experience Near.”
LP $16.35
02/02/2018