Begin Yr Singing

Yr Knives began somewhere off to the side of itself. The Chicago composer and arranger Paul Karner had an idea he couldn't shake: he wanted two very different guitar voices, playing parts that seemed unrelated on paper, brought together on a recording of his own music. He asked Andrew Trim and Brian J Sulpizio. The two were already friends and collaborators, usually with Sulpizio engineering Trim's other projects, but they'd never played guitar together as equals. They practiced their parts separately, neither quite hearing how the pieces would fit. Then they sat down in a room together, and Karner's vision came into focus, along with a second realization: this was a band waiting to happen. That band's debut album is Begin Yr Singing.

That first meeting happened just after the pandemic, a detail that matters to how the group thinks about itself. Sulpizio remembers being unsettled by how quickly the music world wanted to snap back to normal, as if nothing had happened. Yr Knives became, in part, a refusal of that, a reason not to simply pick up where things left off. The four players who eventually formed the band are deeply woven into Chicago's overlapping scenes. Trim is a jazz-trained guitarist who grew up in Nagano, Japan, now based in Milwaukee, who leads the groups Hanami and Retroreflector. Sulpizio is the constant behind Health&Beauty, a shapeshifting, seven-albums-deep project that has long doubled as an incubator for the city's talent. Anchoring them are bassist Douglas McCombs, a founding member of Tortoise and a fixture of Eleventh Dream Day, and drummer Quin Kirchner, one of Chicago's most sought-after players in both jazz and rock circles, whose 2020 LP The Shadows and the Light drew an 8.0 from Pitchfork. As Sulpizio frames the chemistry: two of them come up as rock and roll players, two as jazz players, and the music lives in how closely they listen across those languages.

The writing started around 2022, Trim and Sulpizio shaping pieces over occasional sessions before opening them up to McCombs and Kirchner. What emerged was a kind of mutual completion. A riff one of them had been carrying for years, strong on its own but missing a melody, never quite earning a place on a solo record, would suddenly resolve the moment the other heard it. New ideas came almost as fast. The centerpiece of the resulting sound is two overdriven guitars merging into something neither could produce alone: as Trim notes, play those same notes on a single instrument and the magic evaporates. Over a rhythm section that can lock a groove or let it drift, the music stays exploratory without losing its footing. Trim describes it as "a searching music, asking questions" and "not always answering them," adventurous in how it varies from one performance to the next. Touchstones the band returns to include Sonny Sharrock, Neil Young and Crazy Horse, Albert Ayler, Erik Satie, and Television.

Begin Yr Singing was cut over a few days at Palisade in Chicago, a studio that has since closed, with Nick Broste engineering and the whole band tracking live in one room. They lined up in a single row to capture the spatial feel of a live set, six amps in all, and built each piece from full-take performances with only light editing where needed. "Fear&Trimbling" exists as a single take. Cooper Crain joined Sulpizio to mix, helping pull the record open again at a point where Sulpizio had lost his bearings on it. Karner, the friend whose idea set everything in motion, wrote the string arrangement for "Fear&Trimbling," performed by Rachel Brown and Erin Rafferty. Other contributors thread through the sessions too: Trim's Hanami bandmates Jason Stein and Mai Sugimoto improvised horns on the sprawling closer "White Gladys," a title supplied by McCombs's wife, Kiki Yablon.

The six tracks wear their collaborative wiring openly. "Trimnopedie" started as a sketch with a hint of Satie before the band remade it into something new; "Double A (Start Yr Singing)," a melody that arrived nearly whole, is harmonized across both guitars and dedicated to Albert Ayler; "These Chords" stayed unfinished until McCombs landed the melody that had escaped Trim and Sulpizio for months. For Sulpizio, who has always borne sole responsibility for the mood of a Health&Beauty record, Yr Knives feels different: brighter, less singular, a sound steered by four people at once rather than one. The band has already toured supporting The Messthetics, and the live setting is where its restlessness shows clearest: the same songs, never quite arriving the same way twice.