Makaya McCraven has released “Dream Another,” the second track from his forthcoming album, In These Times, out September 23. The track, which McCraven wrote and recorded in his home studio in Chicago, features Brandee Younger on harp, Junius Paul on bass, Matt Gold on guitar/sitar, and De’Sean Jones on flute. An accompanying music visualizer, directed by Nik Arthur, features hand-drawn, digital, and photographic animations composed and laser-etched into stone in the style of a “zoopraxiscope,” a nineteenth-century animation device, predating the motion picture, that allowed images to move for the first time. You can watch it here.
 

In These Times, the new album by percussionist, producer, and composer Makaya McCraven, is due September 23. It has been in process since 2015 and is the album McCraven’s been trying to make since he started making records, an appropriately career-defining body of work. The eleven-song suite was created over seven-plus years, as McCraven strived to fuse odd-meter compositions from his working songbook with orchestral, large-ensemble arrangements and the edit-heavy “organic beat music” he’s honed over the years. With contributions from over a dozen musicians and creative partners from his tight-knit circle of collaborators—including Jeff Parker, Junius Paul, Brandee Younger, Joel Ross, and Marquis Hill—In These Times highlights McCraven’s unique gift for collapsing space, destroying borders, and blending past, present, and future into poly-textural arrangements of post-genre, jazz-rooted 21st-century folk music.