Second studio album by Matt Sargent and Dani Dobkin
Released October 2026 on Harmonic Ooze Records
Recorded at CART Studios (Philadelphia, PA) and the Columbia University Computer Music Center (New York, NY)
Dani Dobkin - synthesizer and radio
Matt Sargent - guitar
Engineered by Matias Van Order Gonzalez and Dani Dobkin
Mixed by Matt Sargent
Mastered by Andrew Weathers
Liner Notes by Ted Gordon
"Dani Dobkin and Matt Sargent work in a negotiated resonance. They turn "signal and noise" into a false distinction. Their music is one of repetition without intensification, audition without recognition, emergent structure without coherence.
One imagines the music that electronic instruments would make for themselves: the spiritually grounded sound of Sargent's electric guitar and the extraterrestrial signal of Dobkin's systems, in conversation that always hangs on the edge of human comprehension. This is a feature, not a bug. Sonic signatures of intuitive, autodidactic traditions of music are present here: open intervals, fingerpicking, luxurious resonances; but also frequency modulation, formant filtering, smooth and stepped voltage.
They play with and bleed into each other, low-frequency amplitude modulation sounding mirroring and diffracting tremolo, gaps of randomness behaving like the search for the next chord, the next radio station. There is a comfort in this music, an intuitive exploration of the functions, chords, spaces made possible by the pairing of two different systems that share something that can only emerge, be heard in performance.
"New as a Wave" reminds a listener that waves are periodic, yes, but that periodicity is not always easily predictable. The feeling of this this submersion is dynamic, changing: sound behaves differentially, swerving between planes of focus. Melody, counterpoint, chorale: when does a sound become a voice? Their play with different registers, scales, spaces of attention continues with "One Wall is the Desert," which develops a shambolic coherence in the near, middle, and far distance, jammed up, broken, sustained and also momentary. What might be an error reveals itself to be an insistent texture that demands to be heard, even if it's stuck, or even if it is irresolvable. What does an perfect fifth mean to a comparator? These sounds un-stick themselves with different rates of change, producing a consistency with cracks—where the light gets in."
--Ted Gordon / Summer 2026