My Favorite Portland Albums of the Year (So Far)
Welcome, my lovely subscribers, to the first proper edition of Is This Real?, my newsletter covering the Portland music community. Glad to have you with me. My plan is to send out new posts on Tuesdays and Thursdays. One will be devoted to feature stories, while the other will be reviews of new albums.
But for this first post, I decided to take stock of what has happened so far in 2026 with short write-ups of a dozen records from local artists that have captured my attention. I hesitate to call them "The Best" and put that value judgement on them. They're just my favorites.
Caveats: I know there's much that I've missed that didn't make this post. I do my best to keep up with barrage of new music coming out each week, but there's no way to hear everything. And because I wasn't planning on doing a newsletter like this until very recently, I wasn't focused in on the local scene as much as I will be from here on out. I guarantee that when I do a 2026 wrap-up in December, it will be considerably longer. I also left off a couple of very worthy releases due to conflicts of interest. Derek Hunter Wilson's beautiful album Sculptures didn't make the list only because it was released on Beacon Sound, the label run by my business partner. I also didn't include anything from the exciting imprint TOKO TAPE as I have something of a vested interest in them. (Their first release was a collection of beats made using samples of records found in my store.)
With that in mind, I hope you enjoy giving these a listen and giving my words a read. I'll be back on Tuesday with my first feature: a preview of the latest Albina Soul Walk.
Andrew Anderson: Thresholds
The sound sources listed on the back of Andrew Anderson’s latest album Thresholds includes usual suspects like “granular synthesis via contact mic” and “leaves and chimes in the wind,” as well as some delightfully unexpected entries: “old mistakes,” “feet on an old bridge,” and “dying light.” On paper that reads like a recipe for a placid, formless ambient release, but Anderson takes these elements into darker, craggier territory. Opener “Until My Blood Contains All” wheezes and creaks like a farmhouse ready to give way to the force of a cyclone, while “Voice of Fire Come Through Me,” the epic track that takes up all of Side B of the vinyl version, is a slow-rolling wagon train bringing disease and torment to an unsuspecting frontier town.
Marisa Anderson: The Anthology of UnAmerican Folk Music
A few years back, Marisa Anderson was invited to explore the record collection of Harry Smith, the multi-disciplinary artist best known for his genre-defining compilation Anthology of American Folk Music. Through her dive into this massive library spanning genres and continents, she constructed a new album, focusing on songs recorded in countries that have been in conflict with the US since 1970 as her source material. The finished project, dubbed The Anthology of UnAmerican Folk Music, is devastating in its beauty and depth. Anderson, one of the great guitarists, winds accordion and keyboard drones through her intricately picked melodies in a manner that doesn’t simply replicate the familiar recordings she’s drawing from, but cuts her own path using that material as her scythe.
Dry Socket: Self Defense Techniques | Rhododendron: Ascent Effort
You weren't using that head of yours, were you? I should hope not because Dry Socket just blew it clean off your neck and Rhododendron used it to play a full soccer match (with stoppage time). Dry Socket’s latest Self Defense Techniques is a blunt force statement. Vocalist Dani Allen sets the tone from the jump, screaming out our collective fury as she opens the album: “Tired of being scared, exhausted by their hate / No longer living to appease and placate.” The rest of the quartet falls in line behind her with big swings of a musical wrecking ball welded from shards of doom metal and hardcore punk. Ascent Effort, Rhododendron’s first album for The Flenser, is a far more tactical approach to heavy music, but the impact is equally brutal. The trio steadily builds a web of intricate guitar figures and proggy time signature jumps, leading us toward the huge downswings that rattle all the bones in our decapitated bodies.
Foote / Dickow: High Cube | David Chandler and Paul Dickow: Chandler and Dickow Play Fischer
Paul Dickow, the DJ and artist who generally works under the name Strategy, offered up two sides of his multi-faceted musical skillset at the start of 2026. First was High Cube, a set of dizzying, dubbed-up electro and downtempo tracks cooked up on the fly with his pal Brian Foote. Less than a month later came Chandler and Dickow Play Fischer, a thrilling recording of Dickow and fellow sonic wanderer David Chandler (aka Solenoid) interpreting a series of graphic scores made by composer Marcus Fischer using a ’70s modular synth, brainwave readers, and a haptic stylus. No matter how many times I've listened to these two albums, I still manage to uncover new details and crack open new pathways through the labyrinths of some of Portland's finest musical minds.
The MerKaBa Brotherhood: The MerKaBa Brotherhood | Harlan Silverman: Music For Stillness
Roman Norfleet helped spawn all manner of amazing sounds this year, both with his wonderful collective the Be Present Art Group, and the various offshoots connected to it. The MerKaBa Brotherhood features Norfleet on percussion and alto saxophone and his compatriot Andre Raiah, aka Brown Calvin, joining in on Rhodes, electronic drums, and an array of effects for a series of improvisations that tap into the same resonant frequencies that fellow explorers like Sunny Murray and the Art Ensemble of Chicago found when they decamped to France in the ’70s. Meanwhile, Harlan Silverman, the multi-instrumentalist that is part of Norfleet’s Cosmic Tones Research Trio, made an album that, as his press notes say, aims to answer the question, “What might peace sound like?” On Music For Stillness, peace is a heart-rending melody plucked out on cello while birds sing in the background, bansuri flute solos that sound like being gently lifted off the ground by soft hands, and the alluring, third eye engaging clang of bowls being struck.
Mike Murray Trio: March of the Gene Keys
The bad news is that PJCE Records, the label overseen by the Portland Jazz Composers Ensemble, has only released one album so far this year. The good news is that it continues that imprint’s unbroken streak of excellence. Guitarist Mike Murray leads a no-frills bass and drums rhythm section (Shawn Wang and Chris Lee, respectively) through 13 originals that pulls liberally from throughout the past century of recorded jazz. There’s a heavy influence of ECM’s ’70s and ’80s heyday, particularly when Murray straps on his acoustic guitar, but the trio also finds inspiration within the post-modern playbook of Marc Ribot and the Latin swing of Charlie Byrd and Bola Sete.
Phosphene: Velveteen
Phosphene don't try to reinvent the dreampop wheel on their latest album Velveteen, but the duo does put some fresh air in the tires and gives the chrome a good polish. The result is a sleek, smooth ride along a road pockmarked with romantic uncertainties and personal agonies. Cushioning listeners from every bump and rut are the tastefully shimmering guitars that blessedly don't spill over into shoegaze cosplay, subtle psychedelic filigrees that mark songs like “Warding” and “Lupo,” and the soft yet firm vocals of Rachel Frankel.
William Selman: Sanctioned Departures
Would that we all appreciated the sounds of the world like William Selman, the musician and co-manager of new music label Critique of Everyday Life, does. The vivid field recordings that make up his sound library reveal a symphony of natural and unnatural phenomena that most of us choose to shove to the background of our lives. Selman instead homes in on the noises made by howler monkeys, street sweepers, and volcanic springs to generate slow-growing root systems manipulated by digital processing tools and augmented by tones generated by his vintage modular synths. The effect is akin to nestling into a bed of freshly overturned earth and embracing the combination of warmth and chill while the ambient noises of the outside world and the sounds of insects nestling in your body lull you nto a fugue state.
Barry Walker Jr.: Paleo Sol
The music on Paleo Sol, the latest album from pedal steel master Barry Walker Jr., was composed in the precious free time the musician could find after the birth of his first child. He needed to create, but had to do so at a volume that wouldn't snap the youngster awake. Embracing those restrictions produced a lovely suite of songs with the pace and relaxed feel of a long, stoned ride on a lazy river. There's no destination in mind and nothing to fret over. Just a blissful drift pleasantly interrupted and augmented by the presence of others—in this case, the shuffling explorations of drummer Rob Smith and Jason Willmon's wandering bass lines. You could call it country music in a pinch, but the tissue connecting to any one genre is thin and easily snapped. Stop trying to put a name to it and float along instead.
Artwork for this edition is by Uman, a Somali artist who is the subject of In Between, a new exhibition that will be on display at the Hessel Museum of Art starting June 27
