The human voice is perhaps our most organically individual trait and the root of our personal expression. On his latest studio album, Music Made With Voices, acclaimed guitarist and composer Alexander Noice uses a single note sung by eight different people as the sole source material to create eight elaborate, fragmented, and beautiful sonic portraits that reflect our modern relationships seen through a digitized prism.

SCREAMING WHILE PLAYING, the bold debut album by vibrant Los Angeles saxophonist and composer, Andrew Conrad, is an immediately honest glimpse into the mind of an uncompromising artist who does not segregate art and life. Raw and visceral, this record presents a deeply intertwined musical dialogue rarely encountered in an age that favors technology and sheen over unfiltered expression.

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.