REMAIN is a lightning-in-a-bottle document –– the full-length, living outgrowth of a sold-out 2024 collaborative performance at NYC’s Issue Project Room by the trio of 2025 Guggenheim Fellow Holland Andrews and Portland, OR-based duo Methods Body (John Niekrasz and Luke Wyland). 

These three artists have been collaborating for over a decade –– the Brooklyn-based Andrews appearing on records by Wyland’s former project AU and on Methods Body recordings; Wyland on Andrews’ records; all three together as part of Niekrasz’s Orchestra Becomes Radicalized. The sanctity of their friendship and musical bond is palpable on REMAIN. Fully improvised and recorded entirely live at Figure 8 Studios in Brooklyn, REMAIN was engineered by Katie Von Schleicher, mixed and mastered by Aron Sanchez (Buke & Gase) and features the mighty, polymathic multi-instrumentalist Shahzad Ismaily, who augments the trio on the stunning “Stories of My Mother.” 

Like the best improvised music, the pieces that comprise this record hardly feel off-the-cuff. Brimming with uncanny intersections of sleight-of-hand grooves and Holland’s deeply stirring vocalizations and lyrical, ecstatic keenings, this is improvisation at the highest level: a radical act of love and trust. The results are a kind of emergent, urgent, atmospheric art pop, grounded in humanity and concern, but occupying astral spaces and hypnagogic realms. It is a powerful suite of music that cuts to the heart of our time, setting creative practices of freedom against outrage at freedom’s limitations. For these –– as well as aesthetic –– reasons REMAIN acutely recalls the fierce and liberatory recordings of Catherine Ribeiro + Alpes. The elevation of the human spirit, the exploratory aesthetics of revolution, even the eroticization of anger, collective resistance, alternately careening and bludgeoning, dreaming and fighting –– this is REMAIN. 

The players play together, but they also play through each other. Niekrasz’s drums and percussion and Andrews’ live vocal processing were routed through Wyland’s bespoke electronics rig, which itself utilizes custom tuning systems and microtonality. This process and flow allows for creative refraction and a sense of multi-tracked production in real time. Andrews drew lyrics from Niekrasz’s collection of writing on the costs of the socialized self, using intuition and chance operations to determine text selection and order. In all this, the trio constructs and explores their own unique systems, leaning into each other’s energies, communally conjuring. At times ruminative and at others propulsive, the music of REMAIN carries a sense of gravity. These pieces are vivid scenes illuminated and punctuated by fires as milestones –– fires of creation and fires of revolution.