Sumptuous Branching by Emily Rach Beisel

“You won’t find me…” are the first words we hear on Emily Rach Beisel’s Sumptuous Branching, sung in a hauntingly delicate tone over an ominously wooshing soundscape. One could hear it as a warning, an invitation, even a taunt. I hear it as something akin to Sun Ra’s poem “The Melody of the Air,” in which he wrote:

This is not to convert
To lead, to persuade
It is of the spirit of the wind.
And what does the wind know?
It never tells.
Where does it go?
It never tells.
Either of the where of, to, or fro
Nor do I.

At the end of the day, music is little more than a vibration within the air, harnessed by the musician in what is, in the grand scheme of things, a brief moment of inspiration. On Sumptuous Branching, no matter how many intricate means Beisel utilizes to mangle and manipulate her woodwinds, she never loses sight of this truth.

The hypnotizing mist of this first track is quickly pierced by Beisel’s deep, resonant multilayered bass clarinet in the second track “To Rise In Arms.” This sound, one that owes as much to metal as it does Eliane Radigue, has been developed over the years to the point that it could be considered her trademark. Indeed, on Sumptuous Branching, Beisel continues to raise the stakes of what exactly “heavy music” means - not just something that makes you want to bang your head and slam some beers, but a specific energy that kicks your body and mind into a different gear. If it hadn’t been made clear from the first two tracks, the gnashing, sliced-up snarl of “Cantilevers” makes it clear that this is not your typical woodwinds-and-pedals workout.

But more than just a simple “heavy metal clarinet” record, Sumptuous Branching speaks to the versatility and adaptability that is at the center of Beisel’s craft. They have shown themself to be just as comfortable performing contemporary compositions and jamming with a global network of improvising musicians as they are playing solo, and Sumptuous Branching is as dense of a journey as a drone-centric record could be. “Her Still Singing Limbs” features piercing tones, steady drones and choppy textures, all coming from the flute and all colliding into each other over a ritualistic knocking percussion sound. “We Who Behold the Bright Surface” is another ominous dronescape, but the sounds Beisel wrangles from her instrument are more akin to Sun Ra’s synthesizer freakouts than, say, Sunn (((O))). The record ends with its title track, a multilayered elegy that brings a haunted early music influence into the fold and provides a beautiful bookending counterpoint to the opening track “Introit.”

What Beisel meant on that opening track, when she sang “you can’t find me…” is for her to determine. But what we, as listeners, can infer is that in a world chock full of drone artists who do exactly what is expected of them, Beisel will do anything but.

- Levi Dayan, 2026