"The 74-year-old poet narrates the songs of his third album, Mister Sweet Whisper, as if he’s guiding you through a landscape he’s inventing in real time, a world that blurs the binary between “real” and “unreal.”"

In his review of Swan Pond, Bryon Hayes said that the album “deftly captures Silica Gel’s odd but endearing incantations. Its heady brew is rife with ghostly emanations, delightful song craft, cracked electronics and medieval melodies.”

"Wooden Shoe swings words and sounds like a veteran batter at the plate. This composition hits with the deep resonance of a ball squarely struck. Pretty much a grand slam with each base being some different genre or component of sound, Silica Gel cleans the plates."

"On the surface, Worst Spills appear to be a jazz group, but their self-titled debut album is so all over the place that applying any label to them seems like a joke. It opens with an ambient electronic track that shifts between drone, samples, and noise, followed by an unruly swamp-jazz jam, then mathematical improv that lands somewhere between Captain Beefheart and Hal Russell."

"This debut CD by Ghost Food, the supernaturally inclined collaboration between multidisciplinary artist/musicians Joel Nelson and Paul Wilm, was the perfect soundtrack to this year’s particularly haunted Halloween season. Born out of a shared “ghostly experience,” the four tracks combine spectral ambience, obtuse spoken word, and memorable songwriting to wondrous effect, and each moment is just as enigmatic and beguiling as the next, whether Wilm is muttering surreal observations about biscuits (“Hello Ghost”) or Nelson is conjuring unforgettable beauty from his arcane arsenal of instruments (“Ghost’s Come Home”)."

" Since the title at once references revelry and rebirth, International Workers’ Day, and a distress signal, the title serves the playful seriousness and layers of sometimes contradictory meanings of the music. Silica Gel’s approach on this tune is to take folk and classical vocal forms, harmonious and airy vocals, and meld them to brute percussion and jarringly contemporary electronics."

"Skeletal crunches soon drip into the five-minute epic, macabre and enchanting. Thomas and Jones allow their angelic performances to be the glue to hold it all together, swooning in and out of the mix with a chilling reverence. And that’s the most terrifying part. It’s too sweet. Too ethereal. Too enticing not to resist."

In this circular return to form, Jacquie discusses Worst Spills’ new albums with bandmate Joel Nelson, among a weathered invocation for our new movement into method. Heart abounds here in the dark Yuletime. You’ll hear again before the year turns.