Audiopile Review: As they exit their fourth and busiest year yet, Balmat Records—co-run by music journalist Philip Sherburne (we highly recommend subscribing to his Futurism Restated Substack!)— returns Sherburne’s roots in Portland, Oregon for the newest LP from Luke Wyland. A long-time member of the electronic and experimental scene of Portland, Wyland’s already released a substantial body of work through several groups and solo projects, bouncing between bedroom imprints and impressive labels like Leaf and Beacon Sound. But Kuma Cove marks his first proper full length under his own name, a fitting move for an album that, in its own abstracted way, conveys a deep sense of the personal. Drawing inspiration from the natural world, particularly the sublime Oregon coastline, Kuma Cove is atypical of much of the greenery-influenced electronic and ambient music we’ve been inundated with as of late, a sharp but welcome shift away from the usual Mort Garson/Japanese Environmental homages. Instead, it’s a wide-ranging LP that’s decidedly a culmination of Wyland’s varied interests and numerous projects that have led to this point. Wyland pulls from drone, ambient, modern composition and jazz, overlapping these various strands via an array of acoustic instrumentation and digital manipulation that is simultaneously spontaneous and richly emotive. Certainly the most experimental release on the largely approachable Balmat thus far, but it’s also one of its most rewarding and mesmerizing. Top marks.

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“Music is my forever cove,” writes Portland, Oregon’s Luke Wyland of the ideas that give shape to Kuma Cove, his latest album under his own name. Though named after a real place on the Oregon coast, Kuma Cove casts its gaze far beyond the sightseer’s line of vision. Recorded live in the studio and blurring obvious lines between computer-based composition and electro-acoustic instrumentation, it is an album about flow, borders, transitory states, and shelter. Composed of discontinuous ripples and repetitions, shaped into richly emotive arcs, and informed by his experience as a person who stutters, it is also an album about identity, self-expression, and the energies that sluice through and across what is perceived as linear time — like floodwaters seeking an exit, like streams running into the sea. Luke Wyland is an interdisciplinary artist, composer, and performer based in Portland, OR. Wyland has been releasing critically acclaimed records for the past 20 years in the groups AU and Methods Body, as LWW, and under his own name, working with such labels as New Amsterdam, Beacon Sound, Balmat, The Leaf Label, and Aagoo Records. As a person who stutters, Wyland’s approach to music is informed by his idiosyncratic relationship with language. Wyland believes deeply in the cathartic power of live performance as a means for collective healing. Through an interdisciplinary art practice that focuses on improvisation, somatic embodiment, bespoke tuning systems, the cadences of disfluent speech, and time manipulation technologies, he’s collaborated with choreographers, high-school choirs, filmmakers, sound designers, and renowned musicians such as John Niekrasz, Holland Andrews, Colin Stetson, and Abraham Gomez-Delgado. Wyland has toured nationally and internationally and performed at the Whitney Museum, Ecstatic Music Festival, Issue Project Room, PICA’s Time-Based Arts Festival, End of the Road Festival, and Les Nuits Botanique, among others.