I’ve chummily dispensed with the third person for this press release announcing my sextet’s latest album, Avian Field Recordings, a set of seven songs and six often ambient or meditative instrumentals due August 12. Our previous album, Modern Flora, was made up mostly of longer songs, instrumentals, and hybrid forms collaboratively arranged for an expanded nine-piece lineup. This new release likewise, I suppose, weds my roots in singer-songwriterdom with approaches and vocabulary drawn from jazz and improvised music. But its arrangements are less formal, its harmonies generally simpler or open, and we return to our core configuration in which I’m joined by Christopher Thomson on tenor and alto saxophone and clarinet; Michelle Kinney on cello; Zacc Harris on guitar; Dan Carpel replacing Charlie Lincoln on upright and electric bass; and Peter Hennig on drums and percussion. For the album I sang, played pianos and synthesizers, and did the programming on the electro-acoustic material. Steve Kaul, Miles Hanson, and I engineered, and Dylan Nau mixed the album excepting “Hold Music,” mixed by John Fields. More complete credits can be found on the album’s Bandcamp page and on the CD package.

I figure you can draw your own conclusions about the album’s artistic or conceptual aims, but I’ll say a few things about its procedures. By and large with this group, I’ve favored recording “live.” That is, we play and sing together as we would at a club and hope for complete takes, though edits, corrections, and overdubs are permitted when possible. (Because we’re usually playing acoustic instruments in the same room, our sounds “bleed” onto each other’s microphones, prohibiting some postproduction techniques.) For much of Avian Field Recording we stuck to that practice but were sometimes more liberal with overdubs. “Moth and Rust,” for instance, is a “live” take with extras. Four of the album’s tracks—“Corvid Tattoo,” “Hold Music,” “Sidetrack,” and “Avian Field Recordings”—were started at my home studio and produced in a more staggered, contemporary fashion. For the title piece, I started with a field recording of birdsong and other natural sounds recorded on a phone by my wife, Nina Hale. I manipulated those sounds, put them into dialogue with synthesizers and laptop-hatched textures, and wrote a few bars of music that stuff could lead to. Later, the full group improvised to the homemade foundation and found our way to the spare written material. “Endless Black Ribbon”—a quartet with Zacc, Christopher, Peter, and me—is more songlike but largely improvised. Two of the vocal tunes are duets: the noncreedal gospel number, “Christ Came Down a Stranger,” is with Michelle; and “All Things Flash and All Things Flare” with Christopher. The latter song takes its title from a parenthetical in a poem by Delmore Schwartz. Some of the album’s other titles are also referential, though I can’t always remember the sources.

That probably covers it but let me know if you’d like more info.