Booker Stardrum - Close-up On The Outside

Drummer/composer Booker Stardrum delivers a new powerful solo album Close-up On The Outside (27th Feb 2026), his first for We Jazz Records. The new record sees Stardrum (also a member of SML and frequent collaborator of Lisel, Photay, Horse Lords, Wendy Eisenberg, and Jefre Cantu-Ledesma) doubling down on the earthy tactility of human sound and communication while also exploring rich, electroacoustic landscapes. The album, released on LP and digitally, involves Stardrum’s close collaborators Anna Butterss, Jeremiah Chiu, Chris Williams, Lester St. Louis, Logan Hone and Michael Coleman.

While he now lives and works near Kingston, New York, Booker Stardrum made the first notes heard on the new album at an artist residency in the Catskill Mountains in September 2022. The opening title track and the brief “Minturn” place Stardrum’s solo music in the stillness of a late summer farm, with field recordings of insects and birds localizing the music; wooden balafon-like strokes are then looped into the foundational structure of the closing “Inside Sounds,” hovering at poles that are both plaintive and direct. Dry, homemade mallet instruments and field recordings also nod in the direction of Harry Partch, the composer and inventor whose microtonal instruments were under the care of Stardrum’s father, the late composer Dean Drummond (1949-2013).

There’s a lot of warmth and sweat in Stardrum’s music––even if it’s electroacoustic, one feels that it’s made by people, and there is a biologically systemic quality to the way in which digital and analog sounds are interpolated. He creates textures through midi controllers, samples, and loops, wherein acoustic sequences are altered to fit plugged-in concepts or acoustic instrumentalists are brought in to humanize what he’s already mapped out electronically. The people he chose to work with on Close-up on the Outside are mostly artists he’s worked with for years, or been connected to through mutual instigators. It’s important to note that Stardrum, as much as he treats each instrumental section or fragment as fodder for alteration, also respects the individuality of his collaborators. Threading the unique and very present feel of other musicians into his universe with an electronic hand is a fascinating challenge. Stardrum’s compositional intuition allows him to draft, expand, and remove excess as pieces congeal and then breathe in a moment’s time.

Bringing it back to the earthbound carpet that he’s striving for, the push-pull between humanism and machinery ties into an ecological concept that Stardrum wants to call attention to. A teetering, driving piece called “Third Nature” on the new record, as he puts it, “gets its name from a concept in social ecology, that humans are part of nature even though there have been different philosophies that separate humans from nature. First nature is the natural world, second nature is human development, and social ecologists remind us that we are of nature and then the question is, how can we do a better job, exist, be of nature, and affect nature in a cohabitual way?”