Dear Everyone

“Degradient / Dear Everyone” is Kyle Bruckmann at his most uncompromising: a two‑disc, electro‑acoustic fever dream where language fractures, instruments mutate, and structure dissolves into a volatile, self‑generating system. Working from Matt Shears’ surrealist text Dear Everyone, Bruckmann doesn’t “set” the prose so much as detonate it — scattering ninety‑nine voices across a landscape where oboe multiphonics, trombone growls, electric‑bass distortion, and electronic interference collide in unpredictable vectors.

Recorded at Guerilla Recordings in 2016, the quintet — Aram Shelton, Weston Olencki, Jason Hoopes, Jordan Glenn — operates like a rogue research unit testing the tensile limits of sound. The music veers from chamber‑tight counterpoint to scorched‑earth noise, from heavy, lurching grooves to microscopic textural detail. Nothing settles. Nothing resolves. Everything pushes forward.

Disc One lays out the terrain with a series of controlled explosions. “Truncations, Deletions” rides a brutal, percussive bass line that shoves the reeds into overdrive. “Excisions, Autocorrections” feels like a voice clawing its way out of a sealed container, only to be swallowed again by electronic sputter. “Predictable Epiphanies” unleashes a swarm of readers — chopped, layered, cross‑cut — while a bass clarinet solo carves through the chaos like a slow‑moving blade. Even the shorter tracks function as shrapnel: flashes of text, noise, and gesture that destabilize the ear before the next structural shift.

Disc Two opens with “Thereserased,” where classical lyricism is immediately contaminated by electronic squirts and fractured timbres. “Incursive Recursions” slams into a thick, reverberant trombone line that ricochets against screaming electronics and a rhythm section locked into a heavy, mutant groove. “Significant Details” accelerates the album’s cut‑up logic to delirium: voices completing each other’s sentences in grotesque, hilarious, hyper‑precise non‑sequiturs, while the band threads through the wreckage with unnerving poise. Even the miniature pieces — “Next Message,” “Poetry Is Not Political,” “To Conclude: Nothing Herein” — feel like dispatches from a system on the brink of self‑collapse.

Across twenty tracks, Bruckmann constructs a world where meaning is always emerging and always slipping away. The collision of acoustic and electronic sound, the relentless juxtaposition of text and music, the refusal to offer narrative comfort — all of it creates a listening experience that is deliberately disorienting, fiercely intelligent, and deeply addictive. This is not an album that invites passive consumption. It demands attention, rewards obsession, and reveals new fault lines with every pass.

“Degradient / Dear Everyone” stands as one of Bruckmann’s most ambitious and volatile statements — a sprawling, meticulously engineered disruption that pushes the boundaries of what an avant‑jazz recording can be.