Cascade — long-form pieces

Maya Levenson builds slow music from two materials: a wall of modular synthesis she has tuned by hand for a decade, and field recordings — wind across lava fields, meltwater, the long room tone of empty churches. Nothing on a Levenson record is in a hurry. A phrase is allowed to arrive, settle, and dissolve on its own clock.

Cascade, her third album, took fourteen months to record. Much of its raw material was gathered across two winters in Iceland — at Vík, on the black-sand coast, and in the gallery spaces of Reykjavík where she first performed the pieces as 90-minute durational works. She brought those recordings back to a studio in upstate New York and let them weather: re-pitched, stretched, played back through the modular until the field and the synthesis stopped being distinguishable.

The result is six long-form pieces — none shorter than thirteen minutes — meant to be heard the way they were made: patiently, in one sitting, with the lights low. Following Tideline (2021) and Quiet Hours (2023), Cascade is Levenson's most fully realised statement, and her first for the Kranky imprint.