What You May Call It: Da Qi

Emerging from New York's experimental underground, What You May Call It treats the avant-garde less as a destination than as a starting point. Da Qi (Chinese for atmosphere or elegant) pushes that logic hard enough to test even seasoned listeners. This is not a record interested in easing anybody into the experience. The band rarely signals where anything is headed, forcing listeners to either commit fully or wander off in search of safer weather.

The album opens with "Phil's Instant Dystopia"—nine minutes with no runway and certainly no warm handshake at the door. Steve Holtje's electric keyboards collide with Rose Tang's jagged guitar eruptions and wordless vocal outbursts while saxophonist Chris Kelsey threads ominous phrases through the wreckage. Drummer Charles Downs deserves enormous credit throughout the record. His asymmetrical rhythms keep everything unstable without allowing the music to collapse entirely. At first, the piece feels almost hostile. Stay with it long enough and the chaos begins revealing an internal logic.

"Reverie" arrives next at nearly fifteen minutes, taking the title somewhere far stranger than expected. Rather than drifting into dreamlike calm, the piece mutates constantly through fractured exchanges between saxophone, guitar noise and restless keyboard textures. Kelsey's inward-looking improvisations become the emotional center, balancing bruised lyricism against sharp-edged abstraction. Tang attacks her guitar as though traditional chord structures once insulted her personally, creating a performance that feels tense, unsettled and oddly hypnotic.

"Itch My Scratch" supplies the record's sly sense of humor. The title sounds like a grammatical argument overheard after midnight and the music embraces the same unstable energy. Downs' drumming turns especially elastic here, dodging around the ensemble rather than grounding it, while Holtje alternates between acidic keyboard commentary and eerie calm. Every time the quartet seems ready to settle into something recognizable, somebody pulls the rug out from under it.

The sprawling title track closes the album with twenty-one minutes that feel both exhausting and strangely immersive. Tang's guitar dismantles conventional ideas about the instrument while Holtje's keyboards and trombone shift roles without warning. Kelsey delivers the final blow, steering the ensemble through waves of confrontation and near collapse. By the end, Da Qi feels less like an album you heard than an environment you somehow made it through intact.