Squashed Dragons (2024)
Collaboration with Totally Automatic (Anne Ishii, Matthew Lee, Eugene Lew). Recorded upstairs at Asian Arts Initiative, Philadelphia, March 25th 2023, day of toxic water event and the great march for General Humin. Released December 6, 2024. Three drums sets, three guitar amps, an array of reed instruments and electronics and a massive caché of extra percussion. Bubbling, moody, electrified music. Relentless but not chaotic. Mythic but not “epic.” It pulses and surges with life in a rich chemical stew of texture and rhythm, out of which melodies with enhanced limbs crawl slimy and wet across the surface of the earth.
Impatient (2023)
The loop and the ostinato are the concentric circles in which a Sycamore tree will identify its age, its past, its future. So The Early is in fact exactly that, as much as it might be unprepared and not ready for the unpredictable, it is still here for when it is provoked to the occasion of a sound. Their destiny is in the lullaby not the slumber, in the entanglement, not the contact, in the memory not the death. From the primordial universe of Map Turtle, you can hear the duo finding corners inside of a heart beat, multiplying and dividing it over different eras. - Anne Ishii
On Juniper (2022)
On Juniper is the culmination of two years suspended in the practice room. Originally scheduled to be recorded in March 2020, the duo abandoned their record to lockdown, then slowly reignited rehearsals in Jake’s basement on Juniper street with an appreciation for the solace and meditation offered in musical abstraction. By the time they finally made it back to the recording studio (for one day in October 2021), their compositions had eroded and in some places cracked open altogether.