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Paranoid II
Tom Weeks
Label: Wolfsblood
Released: 2025
Views: 265
Tracks
I Hate You With a Passion (for Andre Nickatina); Dummy Data; Kulture Krusaders; A New American Promise; Eleven Rings (for Phil Jackson); A Fire Upon The Deep; Gaye Sex.
Personnel
Additional Personnel / Information
Tom Weeks - Alto Saxophone James Paul Nadien - Drums Shogo Yamagishi - Bass
Album Description
Paranoia, as Philip K. Dick described, isn’t just fear—it’s a heightened awareness that everything, no matter how mundane, might be conspiring against you. It’s the creeping realization that the fabric of reality might be thinner than we believe, and that something is watching us through the cracks. On Paranoid II, the trio of Tom Weeks, James Paul Nadien, and Shogo Yamagishi channels that electric tension into sound, creating an album that feels both unsettling and sharply attuned to its moment. This is music that maps the hidden connections between things, tracing the threads of chaos and control, intimacy and alienation. Every note on Paranoid II carries its own weight, its own edge. Tom Weeks’ alto saxophone moves like a blade through dense fog, slicing through familiar contours and exposing unexpected shapes. It’s fierce and unrelenting, but it knows when to withhold, letting silence amplify its questions. James Paul Nadien’s drumming builds dense, interlocking structures, each strike suggesting an unfolding logic that defies easy comprehension, as if the rhythms are questioning their own architecture while propelling the music forward. It’s not just a backbone; it’s an engine of constant motion, shifting gears, and veering into unexpected territory. Shogo Yamagishi’s bass... operates with quiet authority, carving out space while refusing to be confined by it, laying foundations that are both firm and fluid, stretching the edges of what the trio can build together. This is not paranoia as mere anxiety; this is the sharper, more vivid sense that something larger is at play—something you can’t quite name but can feel pressing against the edges of perception. Philip K. Dick’s paranoia was the paranoia of revelation, the sense that beneath the surface of the ordinary lies a vast, interconnected web of forces—both human and inhuman—conspiring to shape our lives in ways we barely understand. Listening to Paranoid II feels like stepping into a film where every object, every sound, is loaded with significance, and the lines between reality and imagination blur until they are indistinguishable. And whatever it is that you think you hear is maybe just your own twisted psyche at work. This is music that doesn’t stay put, music alive with possibilities, a living map of the moments where certainty dissolves and something new begins. The trio doesn’t offer easy answers, nor do they settle into any one shape. Instead, their sound shifts, evades, provokes—inviting us to listen—closely, carefully, and without assumptions—to what emerges in the cracks. And somewhere within that tangle of sound, silence, and subversion, a question lingers: how do you play music in times like these? How do you create when the ground beneath you is unstable, and the act of listening itself feels like the gnawing suspicion that everything is connected in ways you can’t fully grasp? Paranoid II doesn’t resolve these questions; it throws them back at us, alive and humming. — Nathan Corder, Oakland, California, December 2024
Album uploaded by Maurice Hogue
