Sunwatchers – Music Is Victory Over Time LP Trouble In Mind

In the decade or so that hard-working New York quartet Sunwatchers have operated, the group has steadily & subtly refined their sound – a brain-blasting mixture of jazz, psychedelia, krautrock, punk, noise, & Saharan blues – into something that is avant-leaning enough to appeal to the discerning jazz & experimental music fan & weird & wooly enough to get the true heads’ toes tapping. “Music Is Victory Over Time” is the band’s 5th album, and fourth for Chicago-based Trouble In Mind Records, seeing the long-running lineup of Peter Kerlin (bass guitar), Jim McHugh (guitars), Jason Robira (drums), and Jeff Tobias (alto saxophone and keyboards) in prime form.

The album’s beguiling title stems from a note scrawled in a book about electronic music donated to PITGOOSE Prisoner Books, the grassroots prison literature program run out of The P.I.T. (aka Property Is Theft – McHugh’s Anarchist community space, venue, and info-shop located in Los Sures, Williamsburg). Scrawled as marginalia modifying a paragraph about durational minimalist composition, the concept illuminates music’s material and spiritual power to subdue the sensation of the passage of time, both as an experiential phenomenon and as a creative, communal, and socio-political force. McHugh says: “The notion resonated with our individual and communal experiences of loss, trauma, stasis, and frustration since 2020, our three-year semi-silence as a band relative to our previous characteristic prolificacy, and our progress, projects, and evolution since.”