It’s impossible not to admire Brennan’s ambition. She’s reaching for something beyond the usual boundaries of form and genre.
Pyroclastic Records
Patricia Brennan – vibraphone with electronics, marimba, composition; Modney – violin; Pala Garcia – violin; Kyle Armbrust – viola; Michael Nicholas – viola; Sylvie Courvoisier – piano; Miles Okazaki – guitar; John Hollenbeck – drums and percussion;Arktureye – electronics; Eli Greenhoe – conductor
Patricia Brennan has quickly become one of the most vital voices in creative music. The Mexico-born, Curtis-trained percussionist turned vibraphonist has collaborated with heavyweights like Mary Halvorson, John Hollenbeck, and Arturo O’Farrill, earning recognition from the Jazz Journalists Association as Mallet Instrumentalist of the Year and landing twice on DownBeat’s Critics Poll as a rising star.
Her 2024 debut Breaking Stretch appeared on nearly every year-end best-of list, praised for its lush textures and its ability to weave Caribbean and Latin American rhythms into probing, open-ended improvisation. Her follow-up, Of The Near and Far, sets its sights on different terrain entirely—literally, toward the stars. Brennan built these new compositions by mapping constellations onto the circle of fifths, using that cosmic geometry to shape pitch material. It’s a bold, conceptually driven approach that marks a significant departure from her debut.
The music on The Near and Far feels like it’s always in motion, expanding and contracting in slow waves. “Antlia” opens with a shimmer of electronics before the band kicks into a slow, restless motion, John Hollenbeck’s drums and Miles Okazaki’s guitar adding a faint rock edge that keeps it from drifting into pure abstraction. “Aquarius” has the hypnotic pull of water lapping against a pier—pretty at first, then quietly relentless.
By the time the ensemble reaches “Andromeda,” any calm is gone. The piece crashes in like a storm — sharp guitar picking, stick-on-drum smacks, the vibes turning percussive while waves of strings swirl and collide. Okazaki’s guitar growls like an angry machine, electronics pulse like sonar signals searching for life, and the drums start pushing harder and harder. It feels apocalyptic, or at least unstable. Courvoisier’s piano flurries sound like volcanic ash falling through the chaos, while electronic whines rise and fade like distant alarms.
Brennan’s writing for this ten-piece band—a mix of jazz rhythm section, string quartet, and electronics—is detailed and tightly woven. It often feels closer to chamber music than jazz, though Hollenbeck and Courvoisier give it a looser, more improvisational edge. “Citlalli” is a strange dream of a track, stitched together from improvisations and reassembled electronically by Arktureye. The seams show deliberately—fragments float and dissolve, rhythms stutter and restart, creating something that feels both organic and processed, like memory itself.
There’s something almost magical about Brennan’s process: she looks through her telescope, charts what she observes, and transforms that celestial geometry into sound—a kind of artistic ambition that’s fascinating in itself, even when the music resists easy entry.
It’s impossible not to admire Brennan’s ambition. She’s reaching for something beyond the usual boundaries of form and genre. The music on Of The Near and Far is intricate, at times almost forbidding, but always fascinating. It’s not an album that reveals itself easily. It’s an ambitious step for Brennan, even if it’s not an easy one to follow.
