Walk in Praise of All Metals
Sawyer Editions
Release date: September 2026
Ben Luca Robertson, electro-magnetically actuated strings + spectral processing
Matt Sargent, electric guitar
Recorded and mixed by Ben Luca Robertson and Matt Sargent
Recorded in Cheney, WA on October 19, 2024
Mastered by Al Jones (Laminal Audio)
This enthralling music in 13-limit extended just intonation radiates human agency, and the bodies of the instruments that sound it are up–front, often radically demystified, unfailingly present. True even while the instruments are nodes in a system mediated by computer analysis and spectral resynthesis, feedback to taste. The music is both precise and loose, plainspoken (i.e. confident), punk k-NN but nothing pushy, skillful, strange. Sometimes the ecstatic technique and vibe of the American primitive guitarists (e.g Fahey and Basho). Sometimes adventuring in a landscape, big sky country (writ large). Or maybe the atmosphere of a gas giant where originary future forms rise and rotate over the line of the horizon. Sometimes phrases oscillate angular and–or econo, sometimes a monolithic block of pulse. Far or just behind any foreground elements, always there is self–made ambience, hardly anodyne, layers so integral and subtle they might be left uncognized, ambience that applies for and favors attention. In part that’s given by the still other nature of the tuning, and the weirdly dislocating, revelatory experience of tonal flux. But the what–when of the music is expertly spooled out, too, by two musicians possessed of prodigious technique. Not a lot of misspeaking here. - Ted Coffey