Smoking The Bunny

Smoking the Bunny is the second in a planned trilogy of records by Brooklyn avant-indie outfit Wilder Maker, following 2025's The Streets Like Beds Still Warm. It is expansive, groovy, poetic, and cinematic, at times sidling alongside Broadcast or Tortoise, at others Ry Cooder or Paul Simon. The trilogy draws together songwriter Gabriel Birnbaum's past lives in music, from free jazz and improvisation to indie rock and home recorded four track ambience, while sounding like none of them exactly. "I hope that ultimately this trilogy will be viewed as a time when I liberated myself from my influences and made something no one else would or could or should have made," Birnbaum says.As with Talk Talk's Spirit of Eden and Laughing Stock, editing was treated as a creative act. Band improvisations recorded at Figure 8 in Brooklyn were condensed, run through tape machines and pedals, and reassembled, with vocal melodies improvised and comped before any lyrics were written. Joining Birnbaum's core band and longtime collaborator Katie Von Schleicher are guitarist Chuck Johnson on pedal steel, saxophonist Joseph Shabason, violinist Macie Stewart (FINOM, Jeff Tweedy's band), trumpeter Cole Kamen-Green, harpist Kitba (bec el-saleh), and percussionists Levy Lorenzo (International Contemporary Ensemble) and Will Shore. Von Schleicher's voice appears both directly and as raw material, looped into the title track and transformed into what sounds like a percussion loop at the end of "Bachelor Garbage." Field recordings gathered on Birnbaum's phone over roughly twelve years surface throughout, from cowbells recorded in Greece to his father's voice on "A Drunkard of Days." While "collage" might describe the method, the result is anything but patchwork; the listener is met with a vivid sense of narrative.The record follows the same character introduced on it's predecessor into the small hours of the night, through drunkenness and blackout and into memories arrayed in numbered hotel rooms, reflected in titles like "No Lark (Room 9)." Beneath the narrative are questions of family, identity, and aging: can we really change, and can we escape our lineage? Birnbaum, who recently left the music industry as a livelihood to become a psychotherapist, calls it a midlife record. "One can't be disappointed," he says, "without having first hoped for everything." The third installment in the trilogy is largely complete and due in 2027, making this a catalog piece with a built-in future.