Hailed as making »… the most progressive campfire music ever« by The New York Times, Nate Wooley has been a quiet force in reshaping contemporary American music. Born in Clatskanie, Oregon, Wooley began playing professionally in his father’s big band at age twelve. He is now an internationally recognized performer, a leading-edge composer, and a champion of the wonderful strangeness of American experimentalism.

As a trumpet player, Wooley has been an important interpreter of experimental composition, making his premiere as a soloist with The New York Philharmonic in 2019. His »For/With« series has led to the commissioning, premiere, and documentation of new works for trumpet from composers such as Christian Wolff, Wadada Leo Smith, Sarah Hennies, and others. As an improviser, he has been a part of a movement to redefine the technical possibilities of the instrument. His solo performances have been described as »exquisitely hostile« by Massimo Ricci of Touching Extremes, and he has worked with such iconoclasts as Anthony Braxton, John Zorn, Evan Parker, Annea Lockwood, and Éliane Radigue.

Wooley’s compositions are evolving amalgams of improvisation, folk music, text, and immersive experiences that communicate an arc of human experience from the fragility of being alone to the ecstasy of collectivity. His series of solo works based on the physicality of speech, »Syllables«, redefined the way the trumpet’s virtuosity is perceived. Much of his composition is collaborative, such as his ecstatic song cycle »Seven Storey Mountain« and the ever-evolving Mutual Aid Music compositional ecosystem. Recent work has been dedicated to ecology, documenting the cohabitation of natural features and industrial presence, which then becomes a part of the composition’s polyphony. He has been commissioned by Yarn/Wire, Dither Quartet, and his work has been performed by Apartment House, among other ensembles.

Wooley is also a writer of essays on new music published in The New York Review of Books, The Nation, and E-Flux Journal and others. His writing explores the maverick spirit of American experimentalism as well as shining light on emerging and underheard voices in the international improvised music and composition worlds. To this end, he founded and was the editor-in-chief of Sound American, a print and online music journal making space for musicians to speak in their own words, for ten years. The journal, which had a run of thirty issues, was internationally distributed and remains a critical and community favorite among musicians and music fans.

Liner Notes: Enough sun finally came up on the Wyoming prairie that I could relax my fears. I shut off the studio lights and watched a dune of snow reveal itself under the squat, black graphs of denuded trees. I drank old coffee.

In a rare interview, Wendell Berry defended a concept of community as being a collection of all the living things that surround you. The farmer-poet was careful to clarify that this community wasn’t simply made up of those like you but must also include the creatures—human or otherwise—that you find uncomfortable, maybe even abhorrent.

A deeply political, if simple, idea, Berry’s definition of community was particularly prophetic. As I sit in the midst of a culture eating itself by denying the reality of its differences, his inclusiveness and admonition to attempt empathy toward every member of our living »family« has embedded itself in me. And it was the topic of many a softly whispered, one-way conversation in February 2025—when these pieces were composed—as I watched the Wyoming sun come up again and again over a mountain of snow.

A light flashed across the highway regularly; intervals of three-quarters of a second, if I were to guess. Two flashes each second-and-a half anyway. Four every three. Eighty every sixty. My bucolic hopes dashed by math and man, I went to find my phone.

This music is an experiment in translating Berry’s ideals into sound. After a year and a half of making beautiful recordings of the Columbia River with Annea Lockwood, I began to wonder if I was only paying attention to the worth of the natural sounds that pleased me, setting aside, for example, the noises that are a remnant of humanity’s need to be made existent through the roar of its machines.

»A Fine Rain Anoints The Canal Machinery« is an attempt to build a contrapuntal composition that embraces the confluence between humans and their machines and the uncaring nature they pass through. Recordings of water are interrupted by cars speeding over a bridge. An inlet is roiled by the diesel engines of fishing trawlers. The delicate sounds of wind through reeds and bull steers scratching themselves on a dead tree are underpinned by an eighteen-wheeler balling itself down a valley highway.

As a conceptual work, it is a failure. In my attempt to filter Berry’s ideas through our machine-driven experience of nature, I have instead created a soundscape of loneliness, a reminder of what it was to be in a cabin on the prairie in the snow, watching the sun come up, separated from my animal community by glass, insulation, and drywall.

Signs of life reveal themselves, and I’m no longer alone. Drifting snow has leveled the animal tracks overnight, but one can still discern the sinuous waves of the mink from the elegant, contained hoof-holes of the white-tailed deer. The most recent tracks I made myself: deep and sloppy breakings of the ice crust, clumsy and savage.

releases November 14, 2025 Composed and recorded by Nate Wooley Mastered by Jacob Calland