The experimental composer’s new album is a shapeshifting stream of crackling electronics, wordless singing, and gasping breaths. It’s a stark, solitary listen that radiates an unsettling beauty.

Ka Baird returns with Bearings: Soundtracks for the Bardos, an album that intertwines elements of the New York based vocalist, multi-instrumentalist, and composer’s ecstatic live performances within minimalistic, visceral compositions that expand in scope and sound through collaboration. The album’s eleven movements manifest as shapeshifting invocations defined by their own multiplicity; the emotional outcome of circumstance and grief, played against rigorous conceptualism and musical craft. For more than twenty years, Ka has explored the outer dimensions of sound through performance. Extending far beyond their roots in the psychedelic folk movement of the early aughts, Ka is known for their raw, boundary pushing solo performances that bridge experimental sound, performance art, and ritual. Their tool set in the live arena includes extended voice and microphone techniques, electronics, flute and piano. Bearings follows their 2017 debut Sapropelic Pycnic and Respires, their acclaimed 2019 album. Initially conceived as a twenty minute composition and presentation commissioned by Lampo in Chicago in the spring of 2022, Ka first explored the concept of “bearings” through a series of intimate performances where they shifted guises between magician, shaman, clown, and athlete, all enduring ongoing states of groundlessness through a physically demanding performance that entailed both play and struggle. This piece, in tandem with the heaviness of caring for a dying parent during the subsequent year, laid the groundwork for Bearings, with the album’s final narrative structure revealing itself in the months after their mother’s death the following September. Ka explains: “This record began to come into focus in the summer of 2022. I was living in Decatur, Illinois with my mom after she had received a terminal diagnosis in February of that year. For the following six months, I would work on assembling, arranging, and creating these sounds in the quiet moments while she slept. The live performance of Bearings, combined with the experience of caretaking for my mother and witnessing their death, fomented this record.”