Nate Wooley - Henry House (2025) [Hi-Res]

Nate Wooley’s Henry House is a spellbinding, dreamlike opus blending text, tape, electronics, and detuned acoustic instruments into a poetic, richly textured soundscape. Departing from his free noise and jazz roots, the US jazz trumpeter and composer crafts an 80-minute, five-part song cycle steeped in serene, ritualistic beauty, marking a significant evolution in his work.

Eschewing his trademark trumpet, Wooley anchors Henry House in poetic storytelling, weaving a surreal funeral mass for an everyman using fragmented texts reimagined from writers like Wendell Berry and John Berryman. These texts, reworked into a dream narrative, are voiced by Mat Maneri and Megan Schubert and paired with sine tones, vibraphones, brass, and pianos, creating a hypnotic interplay of harmonics and textures.

The outer and middle movements focus on slowly shifting tones and undulating harmonies, while other sections juxtapose Schubert’s tape-affected choral masses with dynamic field recordings. Expanding on the ecstatic scope of Wooley’s Seven Storey Mountain series, Henry House offers a profound and meditative listening experience, among the finest releases from Ideologic Organ in recent memory.

Tracklist:
1 Acacia, Burnt Myrrh
2 Stump The World (1)
3 Clipped Prose of Juncos
4 Stump The World (2)
5 Aleatory Half Sentences