Crush follows Epstein’s 2013 The Beautiful Moon 12” and is a great flood music, an emotional deep-dive by way of sonic spell. Epstein has strung his folksy, bare-souled heartsongs across a starry firmament and WAY DOWN into a bottomless blue. The sound is a mongrel, electro-acoustic jazz: crisp production that cradles Epstein’s silvery holler and the fingerpicked click-clack of his electric Rhodes piano. His distinctive, loping cadence cuts through the noise and ferries us up a pilgrim path, yearning for a present truth, a pure love. He sings: “through the mask and through the fire, through the red now take me higher.”

High Water, aka Wlll Epstein, is a son of downtown Manhattan who came of age speaking in saxophone. For many moons, he recorded, performed, and alchemized the pregnant silence with Nicolas Jaar, a dear friend since childhood, long before either knew how to spin a tune. The High Water multi-instrumentalist solo-style gestated while opening up several tours for Darkside, Jaar’s band with Dave Harrington. He is active in the NYC improv scene: he regularly shrieks the sweet horn and tweezes the waveforms, jams live scores to cinema reels, and collaborates liberally with fellow aural voyagers—especially Harrington, whose lightning rod guitar work peppers Crush. John Coltrane is his patron saint, and John Zorn his relentless guru. He has grown a deep love for Bob Dylan and his endless, shape-shifter’s myth. These three titanic influences share a spiritualism—a volatile energy to create and destroy the self, to sublimate raw humanity into something impossible and eternal. He sings: “dream about me from ahigh, call me names I can’t contain.”

And such is the spirit of Crush: familiar sounds are stretched past their limits, and lyrics are charged with the power of a ritual text. These nine songs are incantations that conjure little worlds, mikrokosmos, circular love letters that appeal to the rain, the grain, the moon and its dream, the sun. Epstein employs elemental language, as well as the oblique Americana of railroad songs, rising rivers, and “sleepwalking through the pines.” The local past melts into the primordial then wormholes back to the hot present, cutting crop circles into an alien Earth. He proclaims himself “a demon with a moonlight mind.” High on lunar energy, the whole self is laid bare and heart is open, equally ready to make love and to be pulverized into a creaturely dust. It’s a vulnerable state, one that is heightened and transpersonal, an ecstatic skin-shedding dervish. He sings: “You make me cry with all your laughter, you make me dance in this crazy way/ I try endless entertainment, you try everlasting pain.”

Crush is a beguiling, evocative music that, from track to track, recalls a series of short films, a sculptural forest, or a kaleidoscopic fever dream. The gentle lull that begins “Moonlight Mind” kabooms into a pulsing beat with a soulful twitch. Snappy drums are chopped and reassembled; Harrington’s guitar pinches tones in bit crushed screams and inspired blue country twangs. The soft “Forecast,” pooled in reverb, spikes under synthesized high beams and sputtering organ. A guttural sax masquerades as a digital insect frantically cleaning its mandibles—later the horn returns as a distant wheeze, a watery figment. A soft-dub rework of Lucinda Williams’ “Changed the Locks” confirms the love/hurt essence of Crush. Ancient murals spell “Seattle,” a distant place where sensual heat is felt and peaceful melodies fume out of dark tombs. Through all this and the last three songs-- the contemplative final stanza--the prevailing imagery is that of the rain. The album is laced in a life-affirming naturalism, and whenever the gale-force productions come to a head, the pillowy clouds of sound burst into a cleansing shower, drizzling like a granulated rainstick. We are comforted by the knowledge of this self-preserving, regenerative eco-system—that no matter how tumultuous the feeling, deep down, we’re hard to CRUSH.