Progressive Rock
Self-released (oppositional//spectra) · 4 September 2026
“Amargosa Raga” never lets up across seven minutes and forty-seven seconds. Jack Dell’s alto saxophone and Maximilian Jacobs’ violin cross above a piano that marks the chords and a drum kit that does not sit still for a single bar, and the piece accelerates again when there seems to be no speed left. It sounds like collective improvisation and it is not: Nat Bergrin has all of it written down and publishes the scores with the record. The only players working free are Markov Soroka on bass synth and Jason Roe on drums, and you can hear it, because the rhythm section is the one part of the album that breathes like a band.
The name comes from the “Kraanerg” Iannis Xenakis wrote in 1969 for a ballet, a Greek word for an action carried through. The titles come from a herbarium instead: the labellum is the lower petal of an orchid, and Masdevallia and Anguloa are two orchid genera. The correspondence is not decoration, because each piece works the same melodic cell from a different angle, like variations on one flower.
“Blessings in Silk, Saffron, and Naran-Ji” runs eleven minutes and sixteen seconds and is where the album allows itself to sit down: there are elegiac piano passages with both saxophones set far back in the mix, and the contrast with the preceding sprint works. “Anguloa Virginalis” follows, three minutes and fifty-three seconds of solo piano that is not Bergrin’s own writing: it is his improvisation on a guitar piece by Garoto, and the only calm stretch in the whole programme.
The two closing tracks account for thirty-seven of the album’s sixty-four minutes. “Iron Sign of the Masdevallia” (16:43) adds Dom Grande on extra saxophone and is the hardest piece to execute; Bergrin has said he prefers to realise his scores with studio technology rather than write with live performance in mind. “Visible to the Wrong Faces” (20:06) opens on a shimmering guitar, uses Roe’s vibraphone as a harmonic floor, and comes apart in four minutes of drumming at full pressure.
That distribution is the problem. With both long blocks at the end, the first half turns into a twenty-seven-minute preface, and the record asks you to reach its densest hour intact. Bergrin’s voice, mixed at the same level as the instruments, adds a further difficulty: it is an amateur voice on a record of professional writing.
Self-released on 4 September 2026 in the United States. Six tracks, 64:20.
Rating: 8.2/10
Text by Guillem Cardós