Description
Nuke Watch, the free-form project of Chris Hontos and Aaron Anderson, return with Grave New World — their tenth album since forming in 2020. Known also for their sample-driven guise Beat Detectives, the duo take a different approach here: music played live, shaped by improvisation, and driven by pleasure rather than abrasion.
The album is a restless sprawl of modular synths, bass, winds and hand drums, colliding in ways that suggest an electric ecosystem breaking itself down and regenerating. Hontos and Anderson are joined mostly in trios, with key contributions from Otto Willberg and Leonard King on bass, whose playing nods to Percy Jones, Jaco Pastorius and the polyrhythmic drive of Fela Kuti’s Africa 70. Zack Stafford (processed flute), Christopher Farstad (MIDI wind), and Cole Pulice (processed saxophone) expand the palette, tugging the sound toward jazz without ever settling there.
Grave New World resists easy categorisation — somewhere between free improvisation, electronic mutation and fractured fusion. It is playful, unpredictable, and oddly luminous, a record that remakes the world’s noise into a strange and glowing new terrain.
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