| Contemporary music |
Return to Sender: Mark Kirschenmann Wrestles Beauty Out of Pure Feedback
Most musicians spend their careers trying to eliminate noise from their signal chain. Mark Kirschenmann has spent his building an entire album out of embracing it. Return to Sender, Mark Kirschenmann’s new release on Neuma Records, pairs trumpet against a No-Input Mixer, a mixing desk deliberately rewired so its own outputs feed back into its inputs, turning a tool designed for clarity into an unpredictable, self-generating instrument in its own right. The result is eight tracks of genuinely tense, alive improvisation, captured in real time with no overdubs and no do-overs: a series of one-take performances between a human being and a machine that refuses to behave.
To understand why Return to Sender feels like such a natural culmination rather than a stylistic detour, it helps to trace where Kirschenmann has been. An Ann Arbor-based composer, trumpeter, and scholar of creative improvisation who holds a PhD from the University of Michigan and teaches in both its jazz program and its Residential College, Kirschenmann has spent decades electrifying an instrument that most people still associate with pure acoustic tone. His 2010 album This Bionic Trumpet and 2021’s Cybersonic Outreach (recorded and self-produced at home in Ann Arbor during the depths of the pandemic) both explored trumpet routed through pedals, plugins, and MIDI processing, while 2025’s Tonics: 7 Melodies for Trumpet with Bamboo Mouthpipe went in almost the opposite direction, replacing the mouthpiece entirely with bamboo to produce a quiet, flute-like sound built around modal melody and what Kirschenmann has described as a minimalism born of necessity, since the instrument itself simply couldn’t project any louder.
That contrast is worth sitting with, because it makes Return to Sender land even harder. Where Tonics pursued transparency and restraint – Kirschenmann has said he was drawn early on to Steve Reich’s phasing, Kraftwerk’s motorik minimalism, and Morton Feldman’s “ambient” sparseness – Return to Sender pursues almost the opposite ideal: density, volatility, explosiveness, total freedom without any borders and controlled chaos. On his own artist profile, Kirschenmann noted he was in the process of recording exactly this kind of solo work, “comprovisations using the no-input mixer and processed trumpet” and Return to Sender is clearly that project brought to full completion.
The No-Input Mixer itself has real experimental-music pedigree, first closely associated with Japanese circuit-bending pioneer Toshimaru Nakamura, and Kirschenmann treats it here not as a sound-effects box but as a genuine improvising partner, one with, as the album’s own description puts it, “a mercurial mind of its own”. That framing isn’t just marketing language, it’s audible in the playing. Across these eight tracks, Kirschenmann isn’t simply triggering electronic textures and soloing over them, he’s actively responding to a machine that behaves unpredictably, shaping its pulses and drones in real time while his trumpet lines search for a foothold within the storm he’s simultaneously generating. As he’s put it himself, the performer stays in a constant state of improvisation and discovery, the mixer reacting in volatile ways while the trumpet becomes the human element trying to find its place inside that instability. It’s a genuinely rare thing to hear an artist capture that dynamic so clearly on record: most electroacoustic improvisation either tames its electronics into a predictable backdrop or lets them swallow the acoustic instrument whole. Return to Sender does neither. The feedback stays wild throughout, and Kirschenmann’s trumpet earns its place in the mix through sheer improvisational nerve.
The title track opens the album at its most expansive, six minutes that establish the record’s core vocabulary: pulsing analog tones colliding with processed trumpet lines that dart in and out of the electronic texture like a voice trying to be heard over static. “Closed Circuits” and “Circuit Breaker”, the album’s shortest, most compressed tracks, feel like controlled bursts of energy, the No-Input Mixer’s more percussive, glitch-like tendencies given centre stage. “Touch Sensitive” slows the pace slightly and lets a more melodic trumpet line emerge from the electronic haze, one of the record’s more genuinely lyrical moments amid the surrounding volatility.
“Send to Returner” and “Round Trip”, their titles winking at the postal, feedback-loop conceit running through the whole album, build some of the record’s most substantial tension, electronics and trumpet locked in an escalating call-and-response that never quite resolves into simple melody, and is better for it. “Haywired” earns its title honestly, arguably the most unpredictable and abrasive stretch on the album, while closer “Crosstalk” brings the record to rest with a texture that feels less like a conclusion than a fade into silence, as if the feedback loop simply ran its course rather than being deliberately switched off.
Kirschenmann’s résumé reads like a who’s-who of creative improvised music: collaborations and stage time with Wadada Leo Smith, Myra Melford, William Hooker, Oliver Lake, Henry Grimes, Nicole Mitchell, and Rob Mazurek, alongside his ongoing work leading the University of Michigan’s Creative Arts Orchestra and performing Miles Davis’s music with the band Big Fun. Return to Sender is a solo record, mixed and mastered by fellow electronic musician Erdem Helvacioglu, but it doesn’t sound like an artist retreating into isolation so much as one distilling everything he’s learned from decades of collaborative risk-taking into a duet with a machine that offers no guarantees and no safety net. That’s a genuinely compelling place for an improviser of his calibre to land, and it raises a natural question for whatever comes next: after several records exploring solo terrain (of which the bamboo-trumpet intimacy of Tonics, and now this feedback-driven dialogue with the No-Input Mixer) does Kirschenmann stay on this solo path, or does he bring these hard-won electronic vocabularies back into dialogue with other musicians, the way he has throughout so much of his career? Only Kirschenmann can really answer that. But Return to Sender makes clear that wherever he goes next, it’s unlikely to sound like anything that came before it.
Frankie Pfeiffer
Editor in chief – PARIS-MOVE
PARIS-MOVE, September 2nd, 2026
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Tracklisting:
1. Return to Sender 6:06
2. Closed Circuits 3:58
3. Circuit Breaker 4:52
4. Touch Sensitive 5:29
5. Send to Returner 4:59
6. Round Trip 5:17
7. Haywired 5:02
8. Crosstalk 4:38
Total: 40:22
Musician:
Mark Kirschenmann: No-Input Mixer and Trumpet
Return to Sender was mixed and mastered by electronic musician Erdem Helvacioglu
