The Lagniappe Sessions :: Ezra Feinberg

Since Ezra Feinberg’s return to making and releasing music at the close of the last decade, he’s been on an unbelievable run. Feinberg’s contributions to our ongoing series of Lagniappe Sessions square the circle of his sound, offering up covers of the shimmering folk-pop vocal group The Roches, on the one hand, and minimalist composer and Philip Glass Ensemble stalwart Jon Gibson, on the other. Feinberg’s gift has always been to endow minimalist process and ambient expansion with a real emotional weight, so the balance here between lovelorn romanticism and new music abstraction seems particularly on point. Feinberg’s covers are alternately heartbreaking and harrowing.

Ezra Feinberg :: Soft Power

After a trio of excellent early aughts albums with his San Francisco post-prog outfit Citay, Ezra Feinberg stepped away from music to pursue a career as a psychoanalyst. In 2018, he returned to music with his first solo album, beginning an outstanding run of releases that continues to this day with the aptly titled Soft Power. Soft Power mixes post-rock, minimalism and new age, while somehow remaining tangibly human and emotionally grounded.

Ezra Feinberg & John Kolodij

Multi-instrumentalist John Kolodij seems to be quietly slipping out from behind his High aura’d moniker. Next month sees the release of First Fire • At Dawn, a cassette of slowly blossoming compositions that sound like he slowed down the recording of an Appalachian folk ensemble tuning up to a gorgeous crawl, and recently, he unveiled a split EP with fellow audio explorer Ezra Feinberg. For the first time, Kolodij is releasing both under his own name.