Listening to Bloomfield Machine's new seventeen-track instrumental album, “Copium,” feels a bit like stepping into a terrarium during a quiet downpour. The title itself suggests a kind of modern, knowing self-delusion, the balm we apply just to get by. Yet, the music crafted by Huntington Beach’s Brian Kassan is far too sincere for pure cynicism. This isn’t the sound of giving up; it’s the...

Sound Liberation’s “Elegy” isn’t so much an album as it is an unbolting of several sonic cages, letting the inhabitants mingle, argue, and eventually, find a strange, compelling harmony. Gene Pritsker and his rotating ensemble are, as ever, on a crusade against the "segregation of sound vibration," and here, their weapon of choice is grief, remembrance, and an absolutely defiant refusal to sit still...