The most arresting thing about Laura M.’s “Fly Away” arrives before any attempt to overstate it: the single is the 15-year-old singer-songwriter’s first song written completely on her own. It takes the tender, melancholy pull of first love and gives it the perspective of someone meeting those feelings in real time. “Fly Away” makes room for a young writer’s first independent statement. Laura was born in...

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...