San Diego percussionist and composer, Nathan Hubbard, culls together his Skeleton Key Orchestra, for their sophomore effort, Furiously Dreaming. Gathering together a staggering 49 of Southern California’s most ambitious creative musicians, this epic 2-disc achievement is a swirling, seductive, mind-bending sonic array mixing avant-garde jazz and electronica, poetry, and quite literally, the music of dreams.

BURNING GHOSTS explodes from the Los Angeles Underground with an expressionist metal-jazz opus that singes the fabric of a fraying American culture. An ambitious and scathing referendum, this eponymous debut comes at a moment when our civic morality and sense of social justice, our communal values and even our very national identity, find themselves under brutal scrutiny. Holding the mirror close and clear, Burning Ghosts is an uncompromising, incendiary artistic response to ubiquitous injustice. This is music without restraint. 

Ballast, the coiled, stimulating album Los Angeles jazzman Gavin Templeton has been crafting for more than a year, was inspired by a range of thought and experience that continues to drive Templeton – and now, thanks to its febrile, probing nature, us. This tough, hopeful recording is uncompromisingly modern, mostly hard, but at times unexpectedly, disarmingly sweet. And while most of its source material is uneasy, joy, even jauntiness, peek out.

A haunting and meditative exploration of subtlety and sonic space, Christine Tavolacci's hypnotic flute, and Bonnie Whiting's quietly insistent percussion give life to this transportive performance of John Cage's landmark piece, Ryoanji, inspired by the legendary Japanese rock garden. This special release will be a limited edition hand-made package by Eron Rauch and features writing by composer Carolyn Chen.

Screaming harpies, preying mantises, and a needle drilling through the Earth's core? Sounds like metal to me! But what makes Jake Vossler and Aaron McLendon's guitar-drums duo opus Versus an incredible standout in the genre and beyond isn't its speed, brutality, or heaviness. It's the uncanny ESP on display, the immediacy of communication in improvisation, shared sense of imagination, and virtuosity not as instrumentalists, but as mind-readers.