Over the past few years I have curated over a dozen Spotify playlists for ASME Award winning travel and literary magazine Strangers Guide. Each one has been a deep and profound musical journey into the city, state, country or region covered in each issue. Enjoy.
NEW ALBUM: Martez "DRONE POEMS" out 2/17/23
The Drone Poems series represents meditations, feelings and moods expressed through expansive breathy textures. These pieces reflect a radical aesthetic departure from the Lamentos series, which primarily features wind instruments (flutes, saxophones) as the primary engines of sound.
I composed and recorded Behind the Veil and the other pieces on Drone Poems over the summer of 2022 and early 2023 in Oakland and Berkeley, California during what we now call fire season, when a barbecue spark, a misguided bottle rocket, or a random lightning strike can set off a chain of ignitions to poison every breath with smoky air for days on end. Fortunately last year wasn’t that bad, but each day nonetheless began with the anxiety and dread and the question: “Is today gonna be the day?”
The daily news: Russia brutalizing Ukraine, government fuckery, ongoing plagues, colonization of space, schools shot up, cops gone wild, catastrophic storms and everyone stressing about money.
Drone Poems is the effort to bear witness to the world while remaining connected to the eternal.
Thirteen New Songs with Antibalas
Last November we did ten days of writing workshop in New York, played the songs over the past year live at stages across the world, and gathered at Studio G in Brooklyn to record as many of them as were ready.
These recordings will compose the next two Antibalas albums. Expect to hear the first in a few months, around mid-2023.
Summer 2022
Happy belated summer solstice from the Bay Area. I am spending my days parenting, walking the flats and hills of the East Bay, trying to find clean water to my kid to swim, picking stone fruits (plums, loquats, apricots) which are just coming into season, and scoring two big pieces for PBS.
Antibalas continues to bring our new repertoire throughout Europe and North America this summer and we’ll be recording all this for a new album this fall or early next year. There’s a feature on us and our back catalogue in the recent Songlines Magazine June 2022 issue.
Hmm…what else. Reading Joan Didion “Salvador,” B.W. Higman “Jamaican Food”, working on some musical / nature prototypes and a big Fire Wedding collaboration at the end of this month with Earth Lab at UCSC, Annie Sprinkle, Beth Stephens, Guillermo Gomez-Peña, Courtney Desiree Morris and other artists.
Now back to the lab. Love to whoever’s reading this.
New Music: Martez "Shattered" (Lamentos Vol. 3)
Over the past two years, I’ve continued a practice of sonic mourning rituals in a musical container called LAMENTOS. Here is the latest in the series called “Shattered”, a collection of melancholy, raw and plaintive pieces on woodwinds, piano and other assorted instruments. Recorded February-April 2022 in Oakland, California.
New song: Ocote Soul Sounds "Blues for Ukraine"
How to fully express the deep grief in watching the slow motion buildup of aggression, the growing carnage, the racism that seems to emerge even within crises that should unite? Sometimes peace feels like further away than ever. Yet we persist.
New album: Martez "Shadow Work"
The second in a series of works initiated in the beginning of the pandemic to sonify the overwhelming feeling of loss. Let the grief wash over you.
Antibalas: 2022 Tour Dates
The band is back on the road in 2022 with a new repertoire as well as a few old gems.
New Single / Video by Martez: "Don't Make Me Wait"
The video for the new single”Don’t Make Me Wait” by Martez. Instruments, composition and video by Martín Perna