MUSIC

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EMILY RACH BEISEL PaRtIcLe Of OrGaNs

NICO SEGAL TeLl ThE GhOsT WeLcOmE HoMe

TREE & VIC SPENCER SoMeThInG Is NoT

ViRtUoSo

Improviser, composer, and educator Emily Rach Beisel is entrenched in Chicago’s experimental-music community. In fall 2021, they launched the monthly Pleiades Series at Elastic Arts, which “features womxn and nonbinary musicians and improvisors.” Because of Rach Beisel’s experience in this scene, I was prepared to be challenged by their recent solo album, May’s Particle of Organs—but not prepared enough! It’s a showcase for voice and bass clarinet, modified with analog e ects and amplification, and from its first note it doesn’t exactly meet you halfway: opening track “The Indark Answers With Wind” begins with a low, guttural groan that could be a marble spiraling down a thick plastic tube, an abstract sound that warps further as the song progresses until their voice sounds like it’s being yanked into the cosmos by an alien tractor beam. Rach Beisel’s vocals make plain the artist’s love of extreme metal, and they strike me as especially violent and abrasive when set against the stretches of Particle of Organs where the background is spartan if not silent. Their bass clarinet usually sticks closer to the instrument’s familiar vocabulary, and in contrast to their vocal performances, it can provide levity or even relief—their melodic playing in the serene “Warm Upon Your Skin” feels like the sun breaking through turbulent clouds. At the beginning of the song, somber clarinet notes rise out of a low drone like steam o a hot bath, and when I first heard them, a wave of calmness washed over me—a sensation as intense as any of the anxiety and dread that Particle of Organs also provoked.

Trumpeter and producer Nico Segal dropped his debut solo album, this spring’s Tell the Ghost Welcome Home, long after establishing himself as a veteran in Chicago music. He cofounded breakout teen fusion group Kids These Days in 2009, and since then he’s become indispensable to several projects. He’s been an integral part of Chance the Rapper’s backing band, the Social Experiment, and led it on its lone studio album, 2015’s Surf (as “Donnie Trumpet,” his pre-TFG stage name). For the past several years, he’s focused his energy on a jazz group called the JuJu Exchange. With all this experience, Segal has polished his skills to a high gloss, and he can round o the brassiest trumpet solo with controlled smoothness. He sounds nonchalant and easygoing throughout Tell the Ghost Welcome Home , even when delivering performances that you know have him sweating. This is much to the album’s benefit: the childlike goofiness of “Runway [Ticket]” might chafe more if Segal didn’t keep the song at a carefully controlled simmer. This is largely an album of laid-back pop and soul, with Segal’s hushed vocals encouraging relaxed reflection. He recruited a handful of collaborators who could get on his level, including Nnamdï on “Naturally Somehow” and Shawnee Dez on “Scary Spooky” (full disclosure: Shawnee Dez is a Reader employee). Jamila Woods and Aja Monet have their own big albums this year, and I hope their fans seek out their collaboration here—they both appear on the gentle neosoul number “Can’t Look Away,” and it’s a high-water mark for everyone involved.

Few hip-hop artists have made as deep an impression on me over the past decade or so as rapper-producer Tremaine “Tree” Johnson. On the 2012 mixtape Sunday School, he delivers bubbly but thoughtful verses in a crisp, weathered voice over clattering trap beats and giddy looped soul samples, and it’s all seared into my memory. By the end of the decade, the torrent of music he issued through much of the 2010s had petered out, and ever since then I’ve felt like I’ve been missing something. In an April 2022 interview with YouTube-based hip-hop podcast The Super Facts Network , Johnson said he’d stopped making music upon realizing he needed more money for his family—and in an attempt to earn it, he chose a path that landed him in jail. Last year he was sentenced to a three-year bid for marijuana trafficking. According to clips from a forthcoming documentary called Free Tree, when the judge sentenced him in March 2022, he also gave Johnson a 39-day stay. In that brief reprieve before he had to report to prison, Johnson recorded a rash of music. Earlier this summer, he dropped a heart-wrenching album that’s also called Free Tree. I also love his new collaboration with Vic Spencer, Something Is Not, which came out in early July as a follow-up to the pair’s 2019 release, Nothing Is Something . Accompanied by gritty, blissfully washed-out soul samples, the MCs coax tenderness out of each other even while they rap about injustices that’ll make you want to put your fist through a wall. Occasionally a lyric or phrase lands awkwardly, but I still get a lot of joy out of hearing Johnson cook up a meaty number like “Every Day” with a friend like Spencer.

Chicago rapper Valee performs like he’s tuned into a frequency the rest of us can barely perceive, which electrifies his collaborations even when he’s taking the mike on a trash fire of a Kanye album. On Virtuoso, his brand-new fulllength with New York producer Harry Fraud, Valee’s ever-shifting verses function like wild illustrations in a coloring book, and Fraud fills them in with flamboyant, sometimes psychedelic productions that make them leap o the page. On “WTF,” Fraud’s throwback sci-fi synths and spelunking electronic drums twist around Valee’s flip-flopping flow, which flits from laid-back to tightly coiled and back—and then Twista zooms into the picture with one of his hyperfast verses. Chicago shows up strong on Virtuoso, with rising king Saba sashaying onto the summery “Watermelon Automobile” and west-side wonder ZMoney dropping in on the swanky “Uppity” to recapture the magic he and Valee first summoned in 2017 on “Two 16’s.” Valee has made a career out of keeping listeners on their toes, so much so that you can expect curveballs from him—but on Virtuoso he’s found a way to surprise even the people who know he’s going to surprise them. v