Booker Stardrum and Evan Shornstein’s new album begins by depositing you into a new world. “OOPS!,” the title track and opener, kicks off immediately, with monolithic bass and shuffling drums swarmed by an army of insect-like blips and bleeps. You might need a moment to orient yourself, as piano notes hang in the air and keyboard tones settle like mist on a pond; it’s as though your eyes are adjusting, taking in the contours of the twinkling, alien landscape. The drums and shaker keep their mechanized pace, but the electronics constantly brighten and fade like flowers blooming in time lapse. When the song ends after a brisk two minutes, it feels like you’ve walked many miles without realizing it, distracted by the beautiful sensory overload.
The two musicians are consummate world-builders, fascinated by the intersection of acoustic instruments and warped electronic textures. As Photay, Shornstein—a master synthesist and producer—flits between atmospheric house, dubby breakbeat workouts, and chirping electro funk, building his songs’ arrangements into strange, angular shapes. He’s also teamed with Sam Obey, Will Epstein, and Celia Hollander to explore drifting ambient music and spiritual jazz. Stardrum—a cosmically minded yet surgically precise percussionist, multi-instrumentalist, and composer—has collaborated with a veritable who’s who of psych, jazz, and noisenik fellow travelers, including Cloud Becomes Your Hand, Nels Cline, Lee Ranaldo, Wendy Eisenberg, Patrick Shiroishi, and Amirtha Kidambi. He also, along with bassist Anna Butterss, provides the unbreakable rhythm section for L.A. future-jazz quintet SML, where he splits the difference among washy free playing, motorik krautrock pulses, and Afrobeat latticework.
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Though Stardrum and Shornstein have played together in various capacities for years, OOPS! is their first joint full-length effort, following the 2025 two-pack Rafting / Tall Grass. Brief but dense, that EP signaled exciting new ground for the two singular artists. OOPS!, commissioned by Spencer Zahn for the Duets series on his label, Sudden Quarterly, makes good on that promise, expanding the duo’s scope and instrumental palette. In November of 2025, they holed up for a week in Zahn’s Sudden Quarterly Studios in Los Angeles, plugged in, and charted an unknown path.
Both Stardrum and Shornstein are agile improvisers who each flourish within a particular paradigm, but have largely worked without strict allegiance to genre. Here, they pour ideas from techno, jazz, hip-hop, and dubstep into their cauldron, like two cackling mad scientists haphazardly combining elements and marveling at the unexpected results. The basic structure on these recordings is simple: Stardrum sticks to drums and percussion; Shornstein to synths and piano; every composition has the basic goal of landing a groove. But the way they get there is consistently surprising, the players taking strange, circuitous routes on each track.
Throughout the album, the beats seem to glob together, as little accents stick to and protrude from a central pulse—“HUH” opens with a rigid synth sequence, but as Stardrum comes in with just the right amount of swing in his pattern, the sequence slouches, loping like it’s slightly drunk. On “AND A GOOD MONDAY,” Stardrum’s kick carves through Shornstein’s drone at predictable intervals, but he hits rimshots as if fumbling in the dark for a light switch. The ride cymbals that open “SILVER TRIANGLE” establish a tempo, but the track doesn’t feel like it coalesces until downbeat piano chords come in halfway through; each noise skittering through its periphery—stick taps, LFO flutters, pitch-bent patches—serves to bolster its blissful cadence.
