Grave New World

Chris Hontos and Aaron Anderson do business both as Nuke Watch and as their sampled-based cousins, Beat Detectives. The Detectives are what The Beatnuts might make on an experimental dissociative drug protocol, while Nuke Watch is a free improv band that doesn't feel the need to squeak and believes in pleasure. Nuke Watch's new album, Grave New World, is their tenth since beginning the project in 2020. This music dips, collides, and spills out of a bag, the sound of an electric world mulching itself. Modular synths spread like cordyceps through rooms full of bass and saxophone and hand drums, leaving behind a new, infested space: glowing, safe, and freaked. This music was played by instruments, a chunk of it done entirely live. Most tracks are Hontos and Anderson playing with one or two others, meaning most of these are trio recordings. It's tempting to call Grave New World fusion, though that doesn't quite work. Otto Willberg's bass playing is accomplished enough to summon giants like Percy Jones and Jaco, and Leonard King approaches the bass a bit like someone in Fela's Africa 70. The three processed wind instruments-Zack Stafford on processed flute, Christopher Farstad on MIDI wind instrument, and Cole Pulice on processed saxophone-bring the music into adjacency with jazz, though none of the band's music ends up feeling much like jazz. Outtakes from Star Wars foley bank? Touch-sensitive multimedia greenhouse exhibit overtaken by kindergarten class? Zoom session with latency problems generated by musicians in five different continents? Grave New World could be called world music in the sense that if you folded up the world into a funnel and shook it and made everybody slide down onto a plate full of people they didn't grow up with, they might end up making this. - Sasha Frere-Jones, 2025