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LP
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SODA 019LP
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$29.50
PREORDER
RELEASE DATE: 8/28/2026
Keith Freund's music occupies a space where careful musicianship and homebrewed experimentation meet and shake hands. On Window Left Open, spacious melodies drift through dense fields of electronic activity: saxophone lines rise above buzzing circuitry, percussion flickers at the edges of the frame, and clustered glitch textures dart through the music like insects in tall summer grass. Every sound feels vividly animated, a charged part of the same mercurial ecosystem. Freund's talent lies in balancing warmth and unpredictability with remarkable ease. Patient motifs recall the exploratory spirit of early folktronica, while bit-reduced textures, degraded loops, and idiosyncratic synthesis techniques continually reshape the terrain beneath them. Rather than treating acoustic and electronic elements as opposing forces, Freund allows them to intermingle until distinctions dissolve, creating compositions that reward close listening while retaining immediate warmth. This record finds Freund working with a fully formed vocabulary that is truly his own, transforming glitch, melody, improvisation, and atmosphere into songs that are both fundamentally curious and disarmingly engaging.
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SODA 015LP
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Trash Can Lamb is a new solo album from Akron, OH-based multi-instrumentalist Keith Freund. For the better part of twenty years, Freund has been producing intimate, shape-shifting music on his own and as part of collaborative projects such as Trouble Books, Lemon Quartet, and Aqueduct Ensemble. Here, he concocts a heady, homespun broth of analog synthesis, bit-reduced sampling, piano, standup bass, saxophone, and location recordings, arriving at a loose and evocative set of songs. Throughout the album, listeners hear eight-bit experimental delays mangling airy acoustic materials, denaturalizing them into primitive loop structures while retaining their golden-hued, melodic cores. The sputters, hisses, and croaks of handmade electronics nuzzle up to wistful piano and saxophone ruminations; the pure pandemonium of chaotic triangle wave patching and filtered noise settles into the serenity of a backyard dusk full of spring peepers. It's in the space between the ragtag and rough-hewn and the romantic and yearning that Freund situates these compositions; it's a peek inside a workshop that sits atop the trees, branches scraping on the windows, bluejays who just won't knock it off, a table fan spinning slower and slower, its cheap blades covered in dust. All music by Keith Freund, with contributions by Linda Lejsovka, G.S. Schray, Steve Clements, and Corey Farrow. Mastered by Kassian Troyer at D&M. Art/design by Alex McCullough and Felix Luke.
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EXP 019LP
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New solo outing by Keith Freund (of Akron, Ohio based husband and wife duo Trouble Books), coinciding with the band's recent collaboration with Emeralds' Mark McGuire. "Reacting to the sounds around him, words said in passing, shards of birdsong, a glint of breeze and kids at play, Freund stands at the center to create gentle meanderings to add as his part of the symbiotic conversation. The soothing sun is recorded alongside soft voices; the intake of a breath mixes with laughter of children. The album can be understood as a dialogue between the small moments occurring around us and our natural response within the ongoing discussion. Existing outside space and time, each rotation of the record brings the listener some place new or imagined, where beauty overwhelms, an everlasting hum envelops us, and we saunter along as present as we'll ever be."
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