Following his 2023 EP Pianovoz Electroacústica on seminal experimental imprint Deathbomb Arc, composer, educator, and technologist Max Alper, known to many online for his commentary on the state of music education and the industry at large as La Meme Young, returns for a biting full length collection of minimalist songs for piano, voice, and electronics under the Peretsky moniker entitled It Doesn’t Get Cold In October Anymore. As the title implies, this collection of tracks evokes a pessimism while reflecting on a rapidly changing landscape, both at home and abroad, physically and mentally, internally and externally. Each song represents a familial story, whether it be on the subject of marriage, parenting, vocation, political leanings, or religion.

As described by the artist himself:“I began conceptualizing this LP when I first moved back to New York in August 2023 after 4 years abroad teaching and recording in Puerto Rico. I had felt the need to “come home” musically during the years prior, having shifted my practice from noise, sound art, and free improvisation over the 2010s back towards more consonant, minimal, and through-composed song structures, and this finally culminated in me literally coming home stateside in 2023. This feeling of warm optimistic embrace returning to friends and family in the Northeast was abruptly cut short at the start of the War in Gaza on October 7th, and we have been living in a charred October ablaze ever since. This collection of songs, some of which having first been composed as far back as 2018, has since taken on an oeuvre of doubt and shame when they were once moments of joy and triumph. As a long-time believer in Yiddishkeit, Bundism, and liberatory theology, I will never forgive the powers that be that have replaced so much of the initial joy that sparked these works with this seemingly endless weight of sorrow. I release these new recordings as a continued act of reclamation of what was once mine and how I once felt, in hopes of a more just world and the liberation of all peoples from oppression.”

Produced by longtime collaborator Jaydee DeLeon (Enamoured Sound) and mastered by Joshua Eustis (Telefon Tel Aviv, Little Women, Nine Inch Nails), It Doesn’t Get Cold In October Anymore combines the impressionist and blues piano influences of Erik Satie, Charlemagne Palestine, and Emahoy Tsegue Mariam Gebru, the drone doom Americana of Dylan Carlson, and the minimalist vocal pop sensibilities of Anohhi and FKA Twigs to create a sonic palette that is entirely its own. While many shy away from such vulnerability and intimate means of song arrangement and subject materials, Peretsky leans in, all in hopes of being a better, kinder
person on the other side, for both listener and artist alike.