Tiger Bear Wolf "Wolf"
This record shouldn’t exist, but It had to…Formed in the summer of 2002, Greensboro NC’s Tiger Bear Wolf emerged from the fetid wastes of the Piedmont to make their prints across the United States. The quartet of Jonathan Moore (guitar, vocals), Noah Howard (guitar, vocals), Matt Bostick (bass) and Lawrence Holdsworth (drums) self-released their debut album in 2003 and found refuge alongside fellow truth seekers Hello Sir Records of Athens, GA for their second LP in 2005. Twisted riffs of southern rock, fed on a steady diet of hardcore and psychedelic post-punk all filtered into their raw recordings and pummeling live shows. Relentless touring followed, that both sharpened senses and dwindled accounts, and the four entered a prolific creative period penning music for what would be their third album.
Basic tracks for the third Tiger Bear Wolf album were recorded in 2009 between the sweltering heat of a collective performance space and an attic bedroom. It was there the trail went cold. Time and distance intervened, and hard drives gradually succumbed to devilry and malign influences. The record was lost, said to be unrecoverable, and the story was over. Fast forward to 2015, where a savior emerged to retrieve the lost data, almost completely intact from its silicon sarcophagus against moonshot odds. Just for the love and belief that there was something worth saving.
In the years that followed, these tracks took on a new life as guitars and voices were recorded in various states and hideaways with members now located in Greensboro, Louisville and Baltimore. What was nearly lost to the sands of time oozed vitality under the careful watch of the band and it’s enablers at both Howard’s Calogera Audio and producer Joel Hatstat’s Athens, GA studio . After 16 years of patient labor, doubt, hope, fellowship, inspiration, invention, revelation, and faith the long lost Tiger Bear Wolf record was somehow completed. The document finds the group at the full breadth of maturity and creativity for the time of its recording, while also fully colored by perspectives and techniques developed in the succeeding years. What we have here is the music as it was meant to be heard, fully realized with power and subtlety, the heart, tongue, and fang.
Strawberry Hands "A Jazz Blessing For The Animal"
“Nylon string tendrils curve around delayed vignettes like vines, large sweeping moments stomp and rattle the sacral rib cage – asymmetric lyrics – a small beautiful voice coming out of a huge man – A Jazz Blessing for the Animal is at once ephemeral and earth shattering . Somewhere between Terrance McKenna and Gregorian chant. Folk with swagger.”
-Natalie Mering, Weyes Blood
An American DIY lifer, Strawberry Hands is what Philadelphia poet, baller, mystic, songwriter Jacob Brunner does. A Jazz Blessing for the Animal, his first widely distributed release, arrives September 18, 2026 on Otherly Love Records.
Brunner has long been a mainstay of the Mid-Atlantic house show circuit as Strawberry Hands, as well as a collaborator with fellow world-builders Weyes Blood, Karl Blau, Frank Hurricane, and Little Wings.
The genesis of Strawberry Hands extends back to an early-2000s moment in what used to be meaningfully called “indie rock” — Romantic, ramshackle independence shaped by Blakean utopian residue and a pre-financial-collapse network of songwriters across New England and the Pacific Northwest who were experimenting with the scale and scope of the form. Phil Elverum, Dave Longstreth, Fred Thomas, the Weisman brothers, and Olivia Tremor Control are touchstones and kindred spirits, extending the tradition toward total art: studio-as-instrument experimentation, fluency with non-rock musics, elaborate arrangements, and sustained investigations into the mysteries of selfhood and reality.
But where Brunner’s transcendentalist forebears often tilt outward toward wilderness, Strawberry Hands is more closely aligned with someone like Grouper’s Liz Harris or conceptual artist Jacolby Satterwhite — more concerned with finding a balance (or not) between dreams, spirit, memory, alchemical darkness, and a reverence for eros and the disorienting yearnings of the body.
A Jazz Blessing for the Animal, due September 18th on Otherly Love, is the third album in this ever-expanding universe, a crepuscular record made during the small hours in a Germantown bedroom over nine months, by a libidinal, literary mind moving through the back-end of a major depression. It lives at the tenuous borders of things — haunted and sensuous, profane and ethereal, quotidian and transcendent, controlled chance. “It depends on what you mean by ‘real’,” as Brunner puts it.
Built on strange doublings, the album features tripled vocals, bass tracks recorded blind and discovered in collision, elements bounced to cassette and folded back into the digital signal, live and MIDI versions of the same part playing simultaneously, slightly out of phase. Brunner’s methodology is similarly doubled: random phrases plucked from the wild, reframed as poetry, their meanings reverse-engineered and traced back to some imaginary source. “Gas No” from a note found on the ground; “A Jazz Blessing for the Animal” from a church marquee; “Erroneous Donut Holes” turns his mother’s emails into found poetry, then auto-tunes the cut-ups into speech synth liturgy.
There’s always been a subtle androgyny to Strawberry Hands, smearing the line between the spectral and the corporeal without resolving it. The governing philosophy, as Brunner tells it, comes from basketball: “It’s okay to want to be Dr. J — to have an ascendant, upward-striving philosophy. But don’t lose yourself. Stay rooted. Don’t disregard the spiritual possibilities in matter, in food, in fucking. It’s okay to yearn too high, to learn to fly, so long as you learn to play under the rim.”
The nine tracks move through this cosmology with dream logic — trauma and ambiguous loss, manic swagger dissolving into self-doubt, lust as sacrosanct, death as return. The Strawberry Hands sound expands into new territories: “Nude Aria Pissant” floats above a Y2K Timbaland booty beat; “Gas No” is a Bowie-esque torch song; “Song of Descent” flirts with a Chopped & Screwed purple haze, like Mellow Gold on codeine, to evoke Brunner’s descent into himself, a meditation on impermanence and death as a return to peace.
“Dream of Water” is a celestial, country-fried ode to sensuous desire, with pedal steel and strings that recall Townes Van Zandt’s Our Mother the Mountain. Lyrics and title were inspired by Zen monk and poet Ikkyu Sojun, whose portrait adorns Brunner’s bicep. “Ikkyu was famous for his red thread zen — the red thread of passion running through everyone. He’s a classic holy fool, a spiritual rascal, one of those thinkers who engages seriously with questions of taboo and sensuality.”
“What Plant Jumps Over Me” finds Brunner’s falsetto at its most plaintive, uncovering the fork between It Was Hot So We Stayed in the Water, “Drop It Like It’s Hot,” and Robert Wyatt’s Rock Bottom. The title — scrawled on artist friend Jim Strong’s childhood bedroom wall — asks the album’s central question: why must I have the burden of consciousness? “I associate mania with a kind of grandiose spiritual merger with the world,” Brunner explains, “but also with talking shit and nearly getting into fistfights on the basketball court. It’s not all delusional positivity.”
The title track closes with Brunner’s wager: no consciousness without suffering, no art without consciousness — a Faustian bargain, a jazz blessing. Then the refrain:
“I’m some words, I’m some songs, I’m some drums, I’m some dogs, I’m some dishes, I’m some pills, I’m some fish, I’m some cash, I’m some woods loops and half-finished lyrics…”
The record moves furthest from autobiography toward a broader struggle for meaning, curious about something approaching the divine, not as religion but as great mystery. Sacred uncertainty — this is the jazz blessing.
Wovenhand "The Threshing Floor"
From The Line of Best Fit: “
The Threshingfloor is the name of the newly-released seventh album from Wovenhand. The title refers to the location where, in times past, the edible part of grain (or similar crops) was separated from the less-appetizing chaff that encased it. However, it could also refer to the fact that few bands ever make it to album number seven. Fortunately for the world, five years after the end of 16 Horsepower and about eighteen years after beginning his career in music, David Eugene Edwards does not seem to be running short on ideas: The Threshingfloor is a high-quality record of powerful lyrics delivered by Edwards’s powerful voice and supported by instrumentation done in a variety of musical styles.
It’s immediately obvious that folk music has a strong pull on Wovenhand, but the band does not restrict themselves to any particular geographic region or time period. Middle Eastern instrumentation shows up on the title track, while ‘His Rest’ and ‘Truth’ have electronic elements to them. With its country style, closer ‘Denver City’ could have been put out by 16 Horsepower and “Raise Her Hands” draws influence from the music of Native Americans. In short, The Threshingfloor is a melting pot where the elements work both individually and as a whole.
The diversity of the music is admirable, as is the fact that the voice of Edwards fits each different context. The man has quite a pair of pipes, and is not above a little electronic modification to spice things up a little. As is typical with this style of music, the lyrics are at the forefront with Wovenhand, and they are obviously painstakingly crafted.”
hackedepicciotto "LICHTUNG"
hackedepicciotto return with LICHTUNG, an electronically rich and structurally adventurous record that honors the German language. Available on limited-edition candy color vinyl and CD via Mute.
This is Alexander Hacke’s first album since leaving Einstürzende Neubauten. It takes its title – and draws its inspiration – from the home he and Danielle de Picciotto recently established on the outskirts of Berlin, marking a milestone after 14 years of nomadic living. Named after the German word for ‘clearing’, LICHTUNG has become their personal haven and a place for reflection amid a period of global upheaval.
On the album, the pair step beyond the familiar pull of repetitive drones, exploring more complex sound structures and uncharted electronic terrains. Recorded in their new home, the process was as demanding as it was creatively rewarding. They embraced experimentation with new textures, while Danielle returned to the piano, an instrument she had long missed, finding new ways to express herself.
Mindfully written in German as a nod to the language of their surroundings, the lyrics are a loving gesture that firmly anchors this Berlin-born record.