Friday Five highlights music by Washtenaw County-associated artists and labels.

This edition features big band prog-jazz fusion by Elliot McConnell, jazz-rock by Punto de Fuga, country-folk jazz by Maddy Ringo, moody indie by Dick Texas, and two new drum 'n' bass releases on the AGN7 label.

Elliot McConnell, Highlands
Ann Arbor's Elliot McConnell put a bit of everything on his debut album, Highlands, available on streaming and double CD. The trumpeter-composer wrote a collection of tunes that are a bit big band with a smidge of prog-rock and a dash of choral singing—often within the same song. Highlands is stuffed with constantly shifting music that will challenge you intellectually for one second and then have you chicken-necking with the groove in the next instance. The 10-track, 86-minute collection was captured at nearby Willis Sound, and the "Atop the Down" video shows McConnell and Co. recording the tune in the studio.

Punto de Fuga, OptiKa
Victor and Andres Del Corral comprise Punto de Fuga (Vanishing Point), a jazz-rock fusion project out of the Ypsi-Arbor area. The duo splits all the bass and keyboards, with Andres also tackling the drums and Victor shredding on guitar. OptiKa is Punto de Fuga's fifth album, and despite a fairly consistent release schedule since debuting in 2017, I think this is strictly a studio project because I can't find any evidence of the band playing out. 

Maddy Ringo, People of the Earth and Sea
U-M alum Maddy Ringo played The Ark recently, and it's the perfect venue to showcase the mix of folk, jazz, and country as heard on her new album, People of the Earth and Sea. Ringo's flexible voice can shift between husky and operatic, which gives her phrasings unique angles as she croons heartfelt, poetic lyrics (often with a touch of humor). While she doesn't sound like Madeleine Peyroux, Patsy Cline, Norah Jones, Eva Cassidy, or Rickie Lee Jones, those are the musicians who come to mind when I listen to Ringo: artists who can move effortlessly through various rootsy genres while showing the interconnectedness of the music.

Dick Texas, All That Fall
As lead singer of Grand Rapids art-core band Sojii, Valerie Salerno would evoke Nick Cave in The Birthday Party by providing a warbly croon over the band's fractured, grungy sound. After the band's demise, she moved to Detroit, started the Dick Texas project with a more indie singer-songwriter sound, and hooked up with Fred Thomas' Life Like label out of Ypsilanti for All That Fall. It makes sense that Salerno would want to strip things back, slow things down, and allow the music to breathe so her words are heard more clearly: She's a writer above all else, and Dick Texas' debut is filled with eerie lyrics on death, grief, and other messy emotions. Sometimes Dick Texas evokes the late-night haziness of Mazzy Star, but the band's music is looser and less structured than Hope Sandoval and Dave Roback's laid-back but tightly coiled songs. As Thomas writes in the Bandcamp blurb, "It’s not an album of hit singles or easy conceptual throughlines, but one of abandoned gas stations, sun-dried bones, jarring blasts of ghost harmonica on cemetery radio stations, and raw feelings of grief and remorse viewed through a microscope in a recurring dream."

Forgiven Soul, Sudden Movement EP
Ahmad, The Omen EP
If you're a longtime reader of Pulp, you'll know that one of the world's foremost drum 'n' bass labels, AGN7, is based in Ypsilanti. Listen to AGN7's two latest EPs for further proof.

Christopher Porter is a library technician and the editor of Pulp.