Bill Meyer

1 week ago | magnetmagazine.com | Bill Meyer

Titles are often clues to an artist’s intentions, but Words Were Coming Out Our Ears may be more of a motivation. The album’s name evokes an overloaded state, and who in 2025 doesn’t know the feeling of wanting to shrink from too much input? But the LP imparts a very different experience, one of perpetually monitored just-rightness. The instrumental lineup of piano, drums and two double basses is sufficiently unconventional to require care, lest sounds collide or congeal.

3 weeks ago | magnetmagazine.com | Bill Meyer

Trust a man whose ideal compositional form is the palindrome to reckon with this axiom: Everything comes back to where you started, then you start over again. 2023’s American Landscapes, the last record by Dutch lutenist/multi-instrumentalist Jozef Van Wissem and American guitarist/filmmaker Jim Jarmusch, ground their sound down to the essentials of pealing feedback and patiently cycling lute melodies, then let it sprawl, taking up all available space.

1 month ago | magnetmagazine.com | Bill Meyer

Matters of hierarchy often come to the fore when composers and classical ensembles represent themselves on an album cover. Who’s the boss? Who has the name with the most marketing clout? That’s not the case on Interius/Exterius. The composer, Catherine Lamb, and the performers, Ghost Ensemble, have instead expressed this record’s collaborative quality. In 2022 Lamb, an American violist who lives in Germany, came to the U.S. to workshop ideas with New York-based chamber group Ghost Ensemble.

1 month ago | magnetmagazine.com | Bill Meyer

Eli Winter is Chicagoan by choice, and you know what they say about the seriousness of converts. The guitarist moved north from Houston partly to go to college at the University of Chicago, but also to get involved with a music scene he had already admired from afar. Mission accomplished. Not only does his fourth longplayer under his own name feature contributions by a full complement of past and present Chicagoans, its contents are shaped by successive iterations of the city’s musical aesthetics.

1 month ago | magnetmagazine.com | Bill Meyer

Bill Orcutt’s Music For Four Guitars is a bit like a favorite dish. It tasted great the first time, delicious the second, and by the third, you’re starting to realize that it’s endlessly renewable. HausLive 4, an audience recording that was taped at Chicago’s Constellation venue and released on cassette by a local label, is that illuminating third edition.