Weekly Music Roundup: Ruido Tovar, Tyondai Braxton, and Moses Sumney and Kara Jackson
This week, composer and producer Tyondai Braxton teases a new album, a Eurovision surprise, a Latin supergroup’s debut, and a musical tour of a famous Brooklyn cemetery.
The Upset Winner Of Eurovision 2026: Bulgaria
The week in music began with a collective sigh of relief from most of the broadcasters in the EBU (European Broadcasting Union), who collectively sponsor the extravagant, campy music contest known as Eurovision. That’s because the unheralded Bulgarian singer Dara won the 70th annual edition of the event. This year’s contest was overshadowed by politics – not for the first time, but with Israel’s participation leading to five nations withdrawing their artists and the Israeli government apparently working hard to drum up support for their artist, there were real concerns about what might happen if the well-backed Israeli singer Noam Bettan had won. (Including where next year’s contest would be held, as it’s traditionally in the winner’s country.) In the event, Bettan finished second and all the other betting favorites failed to get enough votes to threaten Dara’s punchy dance-pop tune “Bangaranga.” It’s Bulgaria’s first-ever win in the competition (they didn’t even enter the last three years, citing costs); and despite the song’s nonsense title, it’s largely sung in English.
Tyondai Braxton’s Dysfunctional Dance Music
“UnFS” is the new single from composer and producer Tyondai Braxton, our first look at his new album Splayed Werks, which will come out on August 21. Braxton has a wide-ranging career, including the popular prog-math-rock band Battles, his own Zappa-esque big band pieces, and his symphonic music; “UnFS” suggests he’s now ready to make his own twisted mark on electronic dance music. Starting with one beat that then has to accommodate a second, quite different beat, it goes on to draw at least as much from Minimalism as it does from EDM. Braxton describes it as "a rubix cube of sound, rough hewn samples fashioned into a functionally impaired dance track."
Latin Supergroup Ruido Tovar Is Not What You Think
Ruido Tovar is the new supergroup comprised of Colombia’s Meridian Brothers and, from Mexico City, the Mexican Institute of Sound. They bonded over their shared love of the cumbia rhythm, which has swept through the Americas and become a global phenomenon, and the sound of their album, also called Ruido Tovar, is a fun, trippy blend of Latin dance rhythms, psychedelia, and a kind of tropical futurism. The sound is big, but the band, surprisingly, is not. Ruido Tovar consists of two people: the Mexican Institute of Sound is basically the work of Camilo Lara, and unless they’re touring, the Meridian Brothers are not a band of brothers but a single musician named Eblis Alvarez. Their varying takes on cumbia include this “Cumbia del lobo,” which uses cheesy keyboard and needling electric guitar to effectively recall the psychedelic cumbias of the early 1970s.
Ruido Tovar’s summer tour includes a free performance on July 30 at the Dance Floor at Lincoln Center. And watch for their live Soundcheck session dropping on June 8 at www.newsounds.org or wherever you get podcasts.
Moses Sumney and Kara Jackson Collaborate On Is God Is Soundtrack
The film Is God Is opened last week, and the soundtrack came out today. It’s co-composed by Joseph Shirley and the extraordinary singer Moses Sumney, in his first film score project. Sumney enlisted the singer/songwriter Kara Jackson to join him on the key track “Sins Of The Father” (the film is an epic/gothic revenge tale where the father is simply known as The Monster). It’s a somber tune, with some brooding electronics that unsettle the more traditional acoustic instruments behind the vocals: Sumney first, then Jackson, then the two together. But it’s later in the song when Sumney unleashes his not-at-all-secret weapon, his falsetto, that the song reaches its quiet, emotional high point.
Caroline Shaw & Andrew Yee Take A Botanical Tour Of Green-Wood Cemetery
Pulitzer Prize-winning composer Caroline Shaw is primarily a vocalist and violinist, although she does play other instruments; Andrew Yee is the longtime cellist of the adventurous Attacca Quartet. Together they won a Grammy for the quartet’s recording of some of Shaw’s music. Now, they’ve collaborated on a striking duo album called Or, The Whale. The album includes “Moby Dick,” music they co-composed for a silent film version of Melville’s novel by director Wu Tsang, as well as some new versions of earlier works. The album’s initial salvo, though, is a new work written by Yee called “The Trees Of Green-Wood,” which is their addition to a venerable old tradition: the list song. (Think of “Eclipse” at the end of Pink Floyd’s Dark Side Of The Moon, for example, or Billy Joel’s “We Didn’t Start The Fire.”) Here, Shaw sings a list of the trees that grow in Brooklyn’s historic Green-Wood Cemetery, accompanied by Yee’s cello. The telling use of overdubbing and subtle electronics transforms a simple text into something surprisingly dramatic, even moving.
Laura Veirs Genuinely Goes Solo
Portland-based singer/songwriter Laura Veirs writes songs that seem comfortable in a gray area somewhere between folk and alt-country, both in her own albums and in the well-received case/lang/veirs project she did in 2016 with Neko Case and k.d.lang. It’s a testament to the quality of her work that over the years a stellar group of musicians have worked with her, including Sufjan Stevens, Sam Amidon, Bill Frisell, and Colin Meloy of the Decemberists. But now, Veirs is doing it all herself. She’s announced a new album, Temple Songs, on her own label, and released the first single, called “Flying Into Darkness.” It’s a lovely, if somewhat forlorn song about finding space and time to figure out who you are and how to be you in a world on fire. Veirs plays all the instruments, and goes a step further by producing and engineering the album herself, in a studio she built in her backyard. A studio she calls Temple of Sound, apparently. Temple Songs comes out on August 14
