Daily Drops · Vol.120每日唱片 · Vol.120
Ed Askew kept recording in his apartment until he died at 84; his admirers finished the record. 卡拉漢、範艾登、威廉泰勒替一個剛走的 folk 老人，把他生前錄下的 demo 補完成一張唱片。
Ed Askew — The Final Painting（Pick）
Ed Askew was a painter who sang, or a singer who painted; the distinction never much mattered to him. He cut one cult folk album for ESP-Disk in 1968 and spent the next half-century mostly overlooked, taping songs at home and posting them, without ceremony, to his Bandcamp page. He died in January 2025, at eighty-four. The Final Painting is what his producer, Jerry David DeCicca, assembled from those late uploads, with a roster of admirers filling in around the demos — Bill Callahan, William Tyler, and Sharon Van Etten, who sings behind him on "Gray Air-o-Plane." The title is his own, and it is exact: these are last strokes, laid down by a man who knew his hand was steady and his time was not. The remarkable thing is how little the record trades on its own poignancy. It simply lets him finish the sentence, in a cracked, unhurried voice that has nothing left to prove and everything left to say. Ed Askew 是那種只有少數人記得的名字：folk 歌手，同時是畫家，1968 年在 ESP-Disk 出過一張《Ask the Unicorn》。晚年他住在布魯克林的公寓，把新寫的歌一首一首錄下來、傳上自己的 Bandcamp，2025 年 1 月過世，享年八十四。製作人 Jerry David DeCicca（也操刀過他 2013 年的《For the World》）是從那些 Bandcamp 上傳裡第一次聽到這些歌，才動念做成一張完整的唱片。來替他把 demo 補完的，是 Bill Callahan、Sharon Van Etten（先行單曲〈Gray Air-o-Plane〉的和聲）、William Tyler，還有一票樂手。專輯名叫「最後的畫」——他本行就是畫家，這批歌是他留在畫布上的最後幾筆。聽的時候會安靜下來。
Sir Richard Bishop — Hillbilly Erotica
Sir Richard Bishop has been playing in public since Sun City Girls, the band he co-founded and kept alive for twenty-six years, and he has never quite settled into being one kind of guitarist. Hillbilly Erotica is the sequel to last year's Hillbilly Ragas, and it extends the same conceit: a speculative American folk music, imagined rather than inherited. His rule for it is nearly monastic — one guitar, six strings, no overdubs, seven-eighths improvised and the last eighth composed. What comes out is steel-string playing that keeps sliding out of the idiom it began in, a modal recital that mistakes itself, cheerfully, for a hymn and then for something less printable. Drag City has put it out the same day as the Askew, an accidental double bill of men alone with six strings, one saying goodbye and one just talking to himself. Sun City Girls 的共同創辦人、獨奏吉他手。這張他自述是「一把吉他、六根弦、不疊錄，八分之七靠即興、八分之一才是譜寫」的一張臆想版 hillbilly 唱片——鋼弦。它是 2025 年《Hillbilly Ragas》的續篇，一條很私人的「hillbilly」系列：把美國山區音樂的骨架拆開，用他慣有的中東、北非、吉普賽走向重新接回去。和上面 Ed Askew 同屬 Drag City、又同一天上架，兩張吉他唱片剛好湊成一組，一張告別，一張獨白。
The Durutti Column — Renascent
The Durutti Column is, and has always been, essentially one man: Vini Reilly, whose watery, chiming guitar was among the loveliest things Factory Records ever pressed. Renascent is his twenty-eighth album under the name and his first set of new songs since 2010, a gap of roughly sixteen years during which his health, never robust, gave everyone cause to wonder whether there would be more. There is. Mojo hears flamenco shadows and vocal samples threaded through the old pastoral shimmer, which is about right; the record reaches for a few modern textures without disturbing the essential Reilly weather, a kind of bright melancholy that sounds like rain deciding not to fall. The title means reborn. For once the claim is modest. Vini Reilly 是 Factory Records 的招牌吉他之一，音色清亮如水，辨識度極高。這是 The Durutti Column 的第二十八張錄音室專輯，也是自 2010 年《A Paean to Wilson》以來的頭一張全新素材——中間隔了將近十六年。Mojo 形容它把「明亮的 indie 田園」揉進「弗拉門戈的鬼影與人聲取樣」；Louder Than War 直接把它選為本週最佳。專輯名 Renascent 意思是「重生」，這回專輯名自己把自己兌現了。老派的美，可是一點都不顯老。
Cindy Blackman Santana — Coherence
Cindy Blackman Santana is a jazz drummer whom the wider world knows, if it knows her at all, as the engine behind Lenny Kravitz's "Are You Gonna Go My Way." Coherence is her return to the front, seventeen tracks of unapologetic jazz-rock that treat fusion not as a period style but as a live wire still under current. The marquee draw is the guitars: John McLaughlin, one of the form's founding hands, and Carlos Santana, her husband, who turns up on five songs and shares "Guitar Love" with McLaughlin outright, two elders trading fours as if the seventies had never closed. It is loud, busy, and completely uninterested in restraint, and Blackman's drumming, out front where it belongs, is the argument for all of it. 很多人第一次聽見 Cindy Blackman，是 Lenny Kravitz〈Are You Gonna Go My Way〉裡那面炸開的鼓；但她的底子是爵士，1987 年出道專輯《Arcane》請得動 Wallace Roney、Joe Henderson、Kenny Garrett。新作《Coherence》數位版十七首，找來 John McLaughlin 與丈夫 Carlos Santana 助陣——Carlos 出現在五首裡，兩把吉他更在〈Guitar Love〉一曲當場合體。這是那種把 jazz-fusion 的衝勁重新點著的唱片，鼓在最前面，毫不客氣。
Shearwater — The New World
Jonathan Meiburg keeps a second career as a naturalist and writer, and Shearwater's records have always carried a field researcher's attention to strange, specific life. The New World was written largely in the wake of a December 2025 voyage to Antarctica aboard a research vessel, and the band has widened its palette to match the distance travelled. The credits read like a customs manifest: Farouz Zriek on qanun, Mamadou Kouyate on ngoni, Malian percussion from the Ngoni Ba circle, Doug Wieselman's reeds, Thor Harris on drums. The foreign instruments never read as tourism; they blow in from elsewhere and settle into Meiburg's grave, soaring melodies as though they had always lived there. It may be the most expansive thing the band has made, and one of its most assured. Shearwater 的主唱 Jonathan Meiburg 同時是生物學家與作家。這張專輯的大半靈感，來自他 2025 年十二月搭 PS152 科考船前往南極、為下一本書做田野的那趟航程。九首歌，客席樂手橫跨好幾個世界：Shahzad Ismaily、吹薩克斯與單簧管的 Doug Wieselman、彈卡龍琴（qanun）的 Farouz Zriek、彈恩戈尼琴（ngoni）的馬裡樂手 Mamadou Kouyate、鼓手 Thor Harris。這些樂器把一張 indie rock 的骨架，拉到離陸地很遠的地方。
Family Stereo — The Thread
Family Stereo is Blake Watt, twenty-five, and the temptation is to lead with his parentage; I will note it once and move on. What the record earns on its own is a certain narrative economy — songs about a long-distance relationship that suggest much more than they spell out, built over nine unhurried months in a north London studio with the producer Sam Hodder-Williams adding strings and mandolin at the edges. Watt came up as a drummer, took up guitar at fifteen, and writes in a lineage he names freely: Elliott Smith, John Martyn, Adrianne Lenker. You can hear all three in the way he lets a line trail off rather than resolve it. It is a debut that trusts the listener to lean in, which is rarer than it should be. Family Stereo 是二十五歲的 Blake Watt，Everything But the Girl 那對夫妻 Tracey Thorn 與 Ben Watt 的兒子。這是他的首張專輯，在北倫敦製作人 Sam Hodder-Williams 的工作室做了九個月。寫的是異地關係裡的距離與牽連，方法是暗示而非交代——一種很省的敘事。他原本是鼓手，十五歲改彈吉他，十七歲開始寫歌，自陳的養分是 Elliott Smith、John Martyn、Dylan、Neil Young 與 Adrianne Lenker。血緣是話題，但這張站得住的地方在手藝。
Czech Chamber Philharmonic Orchestra Pardubice / Marek Štilec — Krommer: Symphonies Nos. 1-2 & Concertino（補記）
For the week's classical entry, something genuinely obscure: Franz Krommer, a Moravian contemporary of Beethoven who was, for a moment, a rival in Vienna and is now a footnote almost nobody programs. The Czech Chamber Philharmonic Orchestra Pardubice, under Marek Štilec, makes the case for his first two symphonies and a triple concertino, and the case is stronger than his reputation. This is bright, well-carpentered Classical-era writing, played with more affection than duty. No revelation, but a real pleasure: the sound of a provincial orchestra dusting off music that history filed and forgot. 今天的古典補記。Franz Krommer（1759-1831）是摩拉維亞人，維也納時代貝多芬的同代人、當年一度的競爭對手，如今被壓在古典曲目的角落，很少有人排他的曲子。捷克帕爾杜比採室內愛樂由 Marek Štilec 指揮，錄下他的第一、第二號交響曲，外加一首給長笛、雙簧管與小提琴的協奏曲。冷門曲目被撣掉灰，聽起來意外周正、明快——不是每張補課碟都需要理由，這張只要好聽就成立。
Penthouse (ペントハウス) — Neon Garden（補記）
And, to close on something warm: Penthouse, a six-piece from Tokyo who call what they do "city soul," the sweetness of city pop with a soul band's muscle. Neon Garden is their first full-length since 2023's Balcony, and it does what the name promises, all polished chords and after-hours glow. Nothing here reinvents the form; it plays it with the ease of a band that has logged the hours. Put it on for the ride home. 補記一張日系。Penthouse 是來自東京的六人樂團，給自己發明瞭一個標籤叫「City Soul」——City Pop 的甜，加上 Soul 的勁道。2023 年出過全長《Balcony》，這張《Neon Garden》延續那條路線。適合下班的地下鐵，或者夜裡開著車繞遠路的時候放。
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