A Gentle Entrance Into the New Year
some thoughts about boycotting streaming music—plus four instrumental LPs from 2025
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# of Tracks: four albums consisting of 34 tracks
Length: about 2.5 hours if you listen to each LP in its entirety
Themes: instrumentals gesturing at what it’s like to be in tune with planet earth ~ music that is spacey or spacious or both ~ drone and scrape ~ riffs & variations on dub ~ a number of quiet, barely there recordings ~ the audio equivalent of a warm blanket on the short, cold days of midwinter
Links: find them after each individual album listing
Two years ago, I sent out a New Year’s Day edition of AHB’s Goodies called in-between then woke up new, describing it as “a gentle entrance to the year ahead.” I thought I’d do the same for 2026, as we find ourselves living in times when gentleness is in short supply.
Instead of a traditional installment of the AHB’s Goodies mixtape delivery service, though, I’ll use this edition to point you toward a handful of full-length albums. The hours-long, jumble-shop playlists typical of this newsletter reflect how I most often engage with music these days. But new ways of listening are called for, as our attention is increasingly fooled, fractured, and manipulated, both by the hype surrounding artificial intelligence, and by our political leaders who rely on shock-and-awe tactics, misdirection, and a refusal to address the most consequential issues of our time.
With a full year ahead, starting off with one (or several!) of these records may act an agent of focus and attention. These LPs all share a common thread. They’re often barely there, neither showy nor geared to providing conventional “entertainment”; instead, they build a mood, often one of warmth, stillness, or a hushed awe at our time on Earth. A steady systolic rhythm runs through them, quietly reminding us to inhabit the moment.
All of this music is available on the major streaming services—Apple Music, Spotify, YouTube—but since I’m focusing on albums, it felt right to emphasize Bandcamp purchase options instead, along with links to lesser-known DSPs like Qobuz, Deezer, and Tidal. Streaming is a magical cornucopia for hungry listeners, a proper instantiation of the celestial jukebox, and I appreciate it so so much. Yet it has become increasingly clear that streaming is no way to eat a full meal, or to support the real musical ecosystems we need to thrive in the face of AI slop. So this newsletter also gestures toward emerging alternatives to the current cultural dominant of streaming media. Read to the end for more on that.
Follow AHB’s Goodies on… Spotify | Apple Music | YouTube
Four instrumental albums from 2025
Stephen Vitiello, Brendan Canty & Hahn Rowe: Second
Second is a collaboration between three veterans hailing from different musical worlds: sound artist Stephen Vitiello, post-punk drummer Brendan Canty, and art rocker Hahn Rowe.1 The result is a blend of improvisation and collage, anchored by Canty’s confident rhythmic pulse and an embrace of resonance, dub, drone, and little iterative sonic details. Last year, I became particularly fixated on one track, “Rhythmic Rhodes”; it has about 9,000 streams on Spotify and I might be responsible for half of them.
Released in June 2025 by Balmat (Barcelona, Spain & Menorca, Spain)
Seán Mac Erlaine & Caoimhín Ó Raghallaigh: Old Segotia
I first encountered Caoimhín Ó Raghallaigh’s magic through his work in The Gloaming, an Irish-American supergroup that released a pair of records on my label, Brassland. (He also participated in the label’s family reunion in Dublin this past April, which I discuss in an earlier newsletter.)
To get a sense of the eclecticism of his recent duo record, Old Segotia, consider the instrumental contributions credited to his collaborator Seán Mac Erlaine: “clarinets, chalumeau d’amore, three different flutes, car hooter, percussion, live electronics, Wurlitzer, synthesiser, vocals, and alto saxophone.” The essence of Seàn’s playing is captured by a word the label uses in describing this music: blurblings. That’s no slight—these blurblings are reverent and intimate, more like breathing than traditional ambient music. The twitter of birds which emerges around the three-minute mark of the final track, “Oíche Crua Sna Sléibhte” (English translation “Hard Night in the Mountains”), hints at what makes this project so entrancing: it resembles the sounds of nature organized for human consumption, rather than music in the usual sense.
Released in November 2025 by Ergodos (Dublin, Ireland)
Brìghde Chaimbeul: Sunwise
This album primarily consists of Chaimbeul’s solo performances2 on the Scottish smallpipes—a quieter, more intimate cousin of the traditional bagpipe. The sound is primal yet full of rich harmonics, a wonderfully sophisticated wheeze whose drone will steel your body against the experience of a cold winter night. That idea becomes literal when you consider the record’s title, Sunwise, or how Chaimbeul explains her intention for this music to accompany…
the beginning of winter, the darkness creeping in and the cold and the long nights, and also…with this Celtic folkloric character, the Cailleach Bheurr,3 who…was associated with the bad weather and the winter time and the sort of uncomfortable parts of winter… this is kind of her waking up, roaming the moors with her walking stick, making sure she was getting rid of any greenery that was growing through and keeping that sharp frost in the air.
For New Yorkers, Chaimbeul will be performing at the Brooklyn venue Public Records on Wednesday, January 14th — INFO & TICKETS
Released in June 2025 by Glitterbeat (Hamburg, Germany)
Josh Kaufman: What do the People in Your Head Say to Each Other?
What Do the People in Your Head Say to Each Other? is an instrumental record in a folk-rock vein, yet it feels far more alchemical than that, beyond genre. It’s classic rock as it sounded in real time, not as it’s been poorly recreated today, either codified as Americana, or made goofy by jam-band excess. In that sense, it reminds me of The Band’s film collaboration with Martin Scorsese, The Last Waltz—but in soft focus, without the famous voices, and resonating with a gentle cannabis glow rather than a harsh and jittery cocaine high. Amps hum, horns sound like voices. There are no spotlights; everything is softened and slowed.
