Ezekiel Honig, Surfaces of a Broken Marching Band

Surfaces of a Broken Marching Band expands upon the warm, occasionally beat-driven ambient style that New York's Ezekiel Honig previously explored on his previous albums Scattered Practices and Early Morning Migration, a collaboration with Morgan Packard. The record opens with a muddy pool of acoustic samples, slowed and looped out of phase in a way that recalls Philip Jeck's turntable experiments. Jeck's fondness for repetition, and of cryptic musical phrases, informs much of Honig's approach, actually; but rather than vintage thrift-store vinyl, Honig's sources lie in field recordings and his own home recordings of brushed percussion or out-of-tune piano. Fennesz's lush fields of buzzing guitars are another point of reference for Honig's music — particularly on tracks like "Seaside Pastures Part 2," which smears scattered Rhodes notes like so many grapes against an infinitesimal digital sieve.

You can hear Honig's grounding in techno occasionally, surfacing in the loping 4/4 kicks of the title track or the house-inspired handclaps of "A Brief Visual Pattern." But these club-music signifiers are torn free from their moorings and cast adrift in a sea of wilting pianos and droning horns; this is "dance music" only for species in hibernation. The entire album sounds a lot like one might imagine hibernation to feel, in fact: close but not claustrophobic, with furry warmth slowing the brain to a crawl inside a mossy burrow's womb.