| Jazz |
Summary: Waiting Music by Open Thread is an ambitious improvised jazz album that blends electroacoustic textures, experimental rhythms and collaborative spontaneity into a constantly shifting sonic landscape.
Open Thread’s “Waiting Music” Is Music That Refuses to Sit Still
Every journalist who spends long hours writing at a computer eventually faces the same oddly existential question: wired keyboard or wireless? What you gain in freedom, you lose in reliability. The cable may feel like a leash, but remove it and latency creeps in, subtle at first, then impossible to ignore. It is a small modern dilemma, almost trivial, yet strangely revealing of how we negotiate comfort, precision and control.
That thought crossed my mind the moment I pressed play on Waiting Music, the new album by the ensemble Open Thread. Before any recognizable melody emerged, there was movement: scattered percussion, a restless cello line, fragments of sound circling one another as if the musicians were testing the limits of a shared language in real time. The comparison with the keyboard dilemma suddenly felt unavoidable. This is music built on tension between structure and instability, between connection and drift, between discipline and risk.
The group itself is an intriguing convergence. Open Thread is an Australo-Canadian quartet, bringing together artistic sensibilities shaped on opposite sides of the globe. Cultures separated by oceans and histories meet here inside a shared creative language, one rooted less in tradition than in exploration. The ensemble’s instrumentation, balancing cello, percussion, winds and electroacoustic textures, gives the album a constantly shifting physical presence, as though each piece were rebuilding its architecture while the listener moves through it.
The result is not music designed for immediate comfort. These improvisations arrive like glimpses of unmapped territory, fascinating precisely because they refuse to provide easy landmarks.
That also means Waiting Music will not speak to everyone. To fully enter its world requires patience, openness and, perhaps above all, a deep musical curiosity. This is not an album that explains itself on first contact. It asks the listener to meet it halfway.
Recorded in a single day in June 2025 at Vancouver’s The Warehouse Studio, the album emerged at the conclusion of an extensive Canadian tour that brought the ensemble through Montréal, Toronto, Hamilton, Ottawa and Vancouver. During those performances, the group gradually reshaped and refined the material that would later become Waiting Music. That process matters because Open Thread’s identity is inseparable from collaboration. Composition duties are shared among the members, each musician introducing ideas that are then dismantled, transformed and rebuilt collectively through improvisation.
Jazz occasionally surfaces, particularly on pieces such as From The Duck, but it rarely stays still for long. The music slips away from recognizable forms almost as soon as they appear, moving toward more uncertain spaces where improvisation becomes the dominant force. Each musician seems engaged in the same restless pursuit: reinventing a language in real time.
Listening to the album, one repeatedly wonders whether form matters more than substance, or whether the opposite is true. Yet eventually that question becomes secondary. What holds attention is the singularity of the approach itself. Every track feels like a fresh negotiation of space and identity. The work begins again from zero each time.
Rhythm often becomes the album’s gravitational center, echoing real or imagined cultural memories. Around those rhythmic foundations, the cello wanders like a solitary voice briefly losing its direction before returning to the conversation. Elsewhere, angular unison lines dissolve into psychedelic solos. Delicate miniatures evoke the sparse elegance of Erik Satie, while longer compositions such as Sumud, borrowing its title from the Arabic word for perseverance, lean into odd-meter grooves and electroacoustic textures that constantly reshape the sonic landscape beneath the listener’s feet.
The language of the album is abrupt, uncompromising and unapologetically demanding. Over the course of eleven tracks, Waiting Music unfolds as a succession of shifting environments rather than clearly defined songs. There are moments when the music feels almost cinematic in its openness, and others where it deliberately resists interpretation altogether.
In the end, this is an album driven more by atmosphere than by traditional compositional structure. Improvisation is not simply a technique here, it is the album’s central philosophy. That makes any definitive judgment nearly impossible. The record is in perpetual motion, filled with ideas so radically different from one another that the listener is almost guaranteed to feel disoriented at times.
And yet that disorientation may be precisely the point.
There are passages throughout Waiting Music where moments of beauty, tension or resonance suddenly emerge from the chaos with startling clarity. Open Thread is not trying to persuade the audience or seduce it through accessibility. The group is offering possibilities instead of conclusions.
Whether one embraces those possibilities will depend entirely on personal sensibility, musical background and willingness to engage with artists pursuing such a deliberately unconventional path.
By the time the album ends, the opening metaphor returns almost naturally. Like choosing between a wired keyboard and a wireless one, Waiting Music asks the listener to decide what matters more: stability or freedom, certainty or risk. Open Thread has clearly made its choice. The connection may occasionally feel unstable, even volatile, but it is precisely within that instability that the album discovers its strange and compelling beauty.
Thierry De Clemensat
Member at Jazz Journalists Association
USA correspondent for Paris-Move and ABS magazine
Editor in chief – Bayou Blue Radio, Bayou Blue News
PARIS-MOVE, May 11th, 2026
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Musicians :
Julien Wilson – tenor saxophone/ electronics
Peggy Lee – cello
Theo Carbo – guitars
Dylan van der Schyff – drums/ percussion
Track Listing :
Waiting Music
Gods Little Prefect
From the Deck
The Sideway
Pocket Rocket
Rattle Song
Travelling Home
The Surface
Egg on the Escalator
Prince of Spoons
Sumud
Tracks 1, 2, 5 by Theo Carbo
Tracks 3, 4, 8, 9 by Peggy Lee (SOCAN)
Tracks 7, 10, 11 by Julien Wilson
Track 6 by van der Schyff, Carbo, Lee, Wilson
Artwork by Leigh van der Schyff
Recorded on June 30th, 2025, at the Warehouse Studio, Vancouver.
Tracking by Sheldon Zaharko
Mixing by Theo Carbo and Dylan van der Schyff.
Mastering by Joe Talia
Design by Brodie Mcallister
The music was recorded on the unceded ancestral lands of the Musqueam, Squamish, and Tsleil-Waututh people.
Thanks to Jeremy Rose at Earshift Music, The Coastal Jazz and Blues Society, and The Canada Council for the Arts.
Julien Wilson is a D’Addario artist.