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Little Feats is a quiet abandonment of answers and exactitudes. A slow luxuriation in the riddle, the failure, the irredeemably off-kilter. Despite these four compositions pulling from different thematic sources, all are bound by a spaciousness that continually strands us between the conclusion of the last gesture and the commencement of the next. Great swathes of the record are compositionally “silent”, with the instruments falling away to reveal the album’s irreducible base: a field-recorded ravelling of circulating air, distant traffic noise, creaks of resettled player posture, nasal breaths and other such greyed and faint audio ephemera, from which the instruments tentatively materialise and to which they gently return. Guitar notes descend into the interference like seals sliding into the water. The drones of brass and accordion reduce to rasps of expelled air, and then disperse into the hissing void. There are no resolutions here – just a constant reconfiguration of the question, collapsing into absence each time.
We find this endless postponement within Noah Ophoven-Baldwin’s “Tuning” pieces, during which the instruments confront the impossibility of assimilating into a single pitch – the closer they get, the more vividly we perceive their inherent discrepancies. Max Wanderman’s “Midwestern Gradient” seems to transpose this principle to the topography of natural landscapes, with long tones carried through endless glissandic swoops and droops, as if remarking upon the real-world absence of absolute geographic flatness. Adam Zahller’s piece “The Devil’s Questions” is a deconstruction of John Jacob Niles’ writings on a riddling folk ballad, the sung verses splayed across several minutes, holding us in prolonged states of dusty, diabolical obfuscation. Luke Martin’s “Anamnesis” feels like an attempt to articulate the group’s own collaborative dynamic, arranging the sound sources – cassettes, objects, instruments – into strange and illegible symbols that hang in the air before dissolving. One meaning of “anamnesis” is the recollection of knowledge acquired prior to birth, which aligns with the album’s tendency to probe for answers that defy a reduction to earthly terms. Short Americans always return to that irreducible hiss of unadorned space, surrendering the solidity of the known to embrace the quiet bristle of the unfathomable.
-- Jack Chuter
credits
released November 7, 2025
All tracks by Short Americans
Luke Martin, electric guitar, cassettes, objects
Adam Zahller, electric guitar, voice
Noah Ophoven-Baldwin, cornet
Max Wanderman, accordion, piano
Recorded: Minneapolis, USA, February 2024
Mastered: Luke Damrosch
Liner notes: Jack Chuter
A suite of ambient miniatures, each opens with a stereo panned glitch that loops before giving way to moody tones and fizzy circuits. Quiet, thoughtful and lovely. mikehoolboom
this is so wonderful. the sounds of a plenty tiny morsels of human past present and future(s), documented and sewn one unto the other into a babel's cloak. avery
This goes crazy. Never heard something like this. What an experience and definitely opened and inspired my creative eyes, ears, body, and soul abstractshine
Lebanese multi-instrumentalist deconstructs classical tropes through an eccentric array of instruments, including disassembled toy pianos. Bandcamp New & Notable Sep 22, 2022
The Danish avant-garde rock trio join forces with a classical music ensemble for this harrowing LP, a dronescape inspired by grief. Bandcamp New & Notable Jan 26, 2022
Free-flowing, loosely structured songs that borrow lightly from jazz and ambient but expand in directions all their own. Bandcamp New & Notable Oct 7, 2023
A connected suite of miniatures, a densely layered city walkabout, with subtle extensions of metal touches into drones and rising/falling tones, birds sing along with suspense elements, a keenly observed, masterfully assembled set. mikehoolboom