James Krivchenia

James Krivchenia (drummer and producer of Big Thief) announces his new album Performing Belief, out May 2nd via Planet Mu, and shares its lead single, “Probably Wizards.” This spring, Krivchenia will play his first ever live show on Tue. June 17 at Elsewhere in Brooklyn, NY (tickets are on sale this Friday and will be available here). 

Performing Belief is the fourth solo album from the vibrant polymath and his first for storied English electronic music record label Planet Mu. Featuring contributions from electric bassist Sam Wilkes (Wilkes/Gendel) and double bassist/multi-instrumentalist Joshua Abrams (Natural Information Society), Performing Belief builds rhythmic thickets from gathered sounds interwoven with synths, drum machines and other samples.  At the core of Performing Belief is a lush, opulent matrix of percussion ranging from the familiar—hand claps and drum machines—to the mysteriously verdant, sampled largely from Krivchenia’s own field recording collection. Lead single “Probably Wizards” was created alongside Wilkes and carries a profoundly fresh sense of time, blurring the edges of the quantized grid and the boundaries of electronic music.

Krivchenia’s previous release, 2022’s hyperkinetic Blood Karaoke, was composed mostly from hundreds of tiny samples of unwatched YouTube videos. Performing Belief sees Krivchenia  turning from online realms to the natural world. For years, Krivchenia would record his musical encounters with natural objects: performing on a particularly resonant log on a hike, throwing rocks into a pristine pond, tap dancing in the mud. This archive of sounds became the fertile soil out of which the tracks on Performing Belief grew. Having built these rhythmic nests, Wilkes and Abrams bring the presence of a grounding human witness to the undergrowth, providing a centering and even at times melodic voice to the gathering. This rhythmic language, set in Krivchenia’s long-fermenting electronic musical palate, feels like a revelation — it calls back not only to his wonderfully elastic timekeeping behind the kit, but also to his prior work in computer music as well as his deep study of the vast human archive of drumming.

Performing Belief is in good company in the rank and file of the legendary Planet Mu label. From the foundational early releases of the likes of Jega and Venetian Snares, to the contemporary envelope-warping work of Jlin and hundreds of brilliant releases in between, Planet Mu has been a beacon of forward-thinking rhythmic music for decades, informing Krivchenia’s own sense of the weird metaphysics of musical time since he was a kid. Krivchenia’s contribution to this history calls to mind the principle of organic danceability that subtends Mu’s whole catalogue, while bending our sense of rhythm in new and gracious dimensions.