Jazz Archives - Infrasonic Press

Root Cellar releases their debut recording, Fermentations

June 13, 2025 by infrasonicpress

Fermentations is the debut album from Buffalo-based experimental music project, Root Cellar.

The chamber quintet formed in 2017, bringing together a diverse group of musicians with backgrounds in jazz, rock, classical, and the avant garde. The juxtaposition and cohesion of these styles can be heard in both the ensemble’s original compositions and their exploratory improvisations: angular hard bop figurations which melt into hypnotically motorik grooves, poignant post-rock textures erupting into cacophonous free jazz convulsions; and cannily polished ensemble arrangements flowering into atmospheric spaces, always emphasizing each player’s idiosyncratic improvisational voices.

Root Cellar (L to R): Kyle McGinty (trumpet), Evan Kaderbeck (guitar), Katie Weissman (cello), Bill Conroy (drums), Ed Klavoon (bass)

All this and more can be heard on Fermentations, the band’s recorded debut. Captured live in 2023 and 2024 at Revolution Gallery in their hometown of Buffalo, the album is an odyssey through the band’s heterogenous creative practice. On “Blackwell,” an affecting main theme is transformed as it kinetically winds through the quintet’s instrumentation of trumpet, cello, guitar, bass and drums. Mysterious Residents-esque improv, “Garlic Bread Problems,” coalesces into “Simple Suite,” a lush ambient environment structured around rhapsodic melodies. On closer “Bookhouse,” muscular pentatonic guitar riffs alternate with quirky brass interjections before the band locks into a Tortoise-esque groove, a journey unto itself that eventually brings the album to its animated conclusion.

Root Cellar’s “fresh perspective on music-making”—according to Jeff Miers of the Buffalo Spree—”is both fearless and forward-looking,” and “borders on the iconoclastic.”

Fermentations is now available on Bandcamp and everywhere music is streamed.

Michael McNeill releases Barcode Poetry

October 1, 2024 by infrasonicpress

New Releases, News

Ashley Pastore, Barcode Poetry, Dave Ballou, Jazz, Michael McNeill, Shelly Purdy, Susan Alcorn

Michael McNeill is a pianist, improviser, and composer based in Buffalo, NY. While living in eastern Virginia, he started the quartet Allegories, with Baltimore-based musicians Susan Alcorn (pedal steel guitar), Dave Ballou (trumpet), and Shelly Purdy (vibraphone & percussion).

Barcode Poetry is the culmination of this quartet’s first tour in June 2022. The band spent a week on the road, developing McNeill’s tunes and deepening the band’s chemistry. In studio, the band distilled its sprawling improvisations into concise, focused performances. The record is marked by a gorgeous fluidity, with the diverse sororities of the four instruments often merging and emerging from one another in vividly colorful textures. The titular “Barcode Poetry” refers to McNeill’s approach with the band, employing a rigid compositional framework—the black-and-white patterned keys of the piano, the mechanisms of valves, strings, pedals, and bars on his collaborators’ instruments—to empower these machines to yield to the musicians’ poetic impulses.

“Somehow this seemingly unwieldy combination of instruments proved to be an ideal vehicle for our individual and collective explorations,” McNeill explains. “Perhaps most importantly, our personalities meshed well, too. For those who didn’t get to hear us on the road, I hope the distilled recorded performances will provide a window into the collective energy we cultivated that week.”

Barcode Poetry is now available on Bandcamp and everywhere music is streamed.