Reverse side: the napkin and the Brainfeeder record

The new release on Brainfeeder this week is a record I've been holding on to for about six days and I want to talk about it, but first I want to talk about Wednesday night.

Wednesday night I was at Cheer Up Charlies because a friend was spinning and I owed her a round and also, frankly, I needed to be in a room. It had been one of those weeks. The room was about 60 percent full at 11 p.m., which is the exact ratio at which a room becomes good — any less and it's sad, any more and you can't move, 60 is when the sound fills the space but you can still stand at the bar and actually hear the person next to you, which is what music is for.

She played a track about forty minutes in that I didn't recognize. I went up to the booth between songs and asked what it was. She wrote it on a napkin. I took the napkin home.

I'm not going to tell you what was on the napkin.

What I am going to tell you is that the record I've been holding onto — the new one, on Brainfeeder — has a track on side B that does the same thing the napkin track did. Not the same sound. The same thing. There is a difference.

The record is called Alluvial. The artist is someone who has been releasing under a different name for about three years on smaller labels and who has, with this record, graduated. I'm going to skip the career rundown because the internet has the career rundown and frankly the career rundown is not why we're here. We're here because Alluvial is the best thing Brainfeeder has put out since 2022 and I want to tell you why.

The record is 44 minutes long. Eight tracks. Side A is four tracks of what you would expect from a Brainfeeder debut in 2026 — broken-beat architecture, a lot of space in the low end, the kind of sample selection that signals the artist has spent real time with the Alice Coltrane discography. It's good. I want to be clear: side A is good. If you stopped listening to the record at the end of side A you would have had a nice time and you would put the record back on the shelf satisfied.

Do not stop listening to the record at the end of side A.

Side B opens with a track called "Meridian Hour." It is six minutes and forty seconds long. It is, structurally, not that different from what came before it — the same palette, the same pocket, the same commitment to space over event — but something is different, and I have spent six days trying to articulate what that something is, and I think I finally have it.

The track is patient.

I know that sounds like nothing. I know "patience" is a word that gets thrown at every slow record and every long chord and every piece of music that refuses to provide a hook in the first forty seconds. But I want to use it specifically here, because what "Meridian Hour" is doing is not slow, exactly — the BPM is not that slow, the track moves — and it is not sparse, because there's actually a lot happening in the arrangement. What it is is unafraid of its own duration. It lets a phrase finish. It waits. It comes back to something you heard a minute earlier and does it again, but not quite the same, and not because the artist is showing off the variation but because the variation is what the track is about.

That's the napkin thing. That's what my friend was playing on Wednesday night. That's what the track she wrote on the napkin was doing, and it's what "Meridian Hour" is doing, and I think — I could be wrong about this, and I want to give it another six days before I commit fully — but I think we are watching the arrival of a specific new temperature in this music. A patience that is not austerity and not minimalism and not restraint. Something else.

The rest of side B holds the temperature. Track 6 — "Low Tide, Later" — does something with a Rhodes figure that I am still trying to parse. Track 7 is a collaboration with a vocalist I won't name here because the vocalist is someone I know, loosely, through the scene, and I don't want to put my finger on the scale. Track 8 is a closer that, in a different record, would be the centerpiece, and here is allowed to be the closer, and that decision is why the record is as good as it is.

Okay. A few quick things:

The Cheer Up Charlies set from Wednesday night is, I believe, going up on my friend's SoundCloud this weekend. I'm not going to link it — she'll link it when she's ready — but if you follow me you'll see it when it goes up. The napkin track is in there.

The Pressing is, as some of you know, launching its podcast this Friday. It's called Second Pressing. The first episode is a conversation I had with someone you know from this paper about music across generations. I think it's good. I was nervous about the conversation and in the end the conversation was not nervous, which is usually how that goes. Episode 1 drops Friday.

I'm going to write about my aliases next week, I think, or maybe the week after — a reader wrote in and asked which ones are mine and which ones aren't, and I owe an answer, even if the answer is going to be unsatisfying.

See you at the next one.

— Jr.