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

This edition features art songs by Black composers courtesy of Louise Toppin and Darryl Taylor, a meditative Gifts of Art compilation, experimental organ/keyboard/electronics by Latimer Rogland, Americana by Matt McCleskey, and singer-songwriter tunes by Lauren Blackford.

Louise Toppin and Darryl Taylor, Dear Friends and Gentle Hearts
Some duos just make sense: Hall and Oates, OutKast, Simon & Garfunkel, Eric B. & Rakim—now add Toppin and Taylor to that list. Soprano Louise Toppin, a professor in U-M's Department of Voice & Opera, and her longtime friend Darryl Taylor, a countertenor and U-M grad, teamed up for this double CD collection. Dear Friends and Gentle Hearts features art songs—vocal tunes written in the classical tradition—written by Black American composers. The album was partly inspired by legendary U-M professor George Shirley, who was Toppin and Taylor's teacher back in the day. He heard them sing a spiritual duet version of "Balm in Gilead" in concert, and Shirley said their voices "blended so beautifully" that they should record an album together. 

A beautiful blend, indeed, especially if you're not familiar with what a male countertenor sounds like—you might be mistaken for thinking both voices were that of Toppin. Taylor's singing is so clear, clean, and high—without being soprano—that it makes for an incredible listening experience. The's a wide mixture of gorgeous opera, sacred songs, vocal chamber music, and small-group classical throughout these 42 songs, but it's Toppin and Taylor's stunning voices that are the stars. 

Ann Arbor has a long history of being one of the intellectual homes of Black art songs, with Professor Shirley and fellow educator and scholar Willis Patterson leading the way. Louise Toppin and Darryl Taylor's Dear Friends and Gentle Hearts is the latest addition to that legacy. 

Various artists, Sanctuaries
Michigan Medicine's Gifts of Art program flies a bit under the radar to the general public because going to a hospital to view paintings, sculptures, etc. doesn't come naturally to the fore of one's mind when considering exhibitions. Ultimately, the longstanding Gifts of Art exhibitions are for the patients and families who have to go to a hospital, and it's a beautiful program aimed at holistic health—so it's no surprise the program would branch out to music, too. While Gifts of Art has weekly concerts already, and the Life Sciences Orchestra plays two concerts a year at Hill Auditorium, the program has now branched out into recorded music with Sanctuaries, a 20-track compilation of meditative acoustic sounds.

Recorded on North Campus' Duderstadt studios, Sanctuaries features ambient music as it was made in the pre-synthesizer era: acoustic guitar, harps, piano, hand pans, flute, stringed instruments, field recordings, etc. Like everything with Gifts of Art's programs, it's designed to soothe, stimulate, or satiate your mind even as your body might trouble you. Sanctuaries was also made to help relaunch the renovated University Hospital chapel, where I believe a 17-track CD version of the album is available. 

Latimer Rogland, Edisto Warehouse Dirge EP 
The pipe organ might seem like it has a staid tradition—after all, you pretty much only find them in churches and old movie houses. But there's a whole world of experimental musicians who have used the gargantuan instrument to explore new sounds, and Ann Arbor's Latimer Rogland is among those explorers. The U-M major in performance and sacred music doesn't stick to the pipe organ on his latest release, Edisto Warehouse Dirge—in fact, he might not play it at all, though the title track certainly features an organ of some kind. It's just that the instrument has been treated with effects that make it sound like it's decaying and distorting, evoking both the skipping CD sounds of Oval and the tape-loop effects of Brian Eno's Discreet Music. The 1950s sci-fi soundtrack-like "Flowers at the UC Irvine Social Science Plaza" is likely the result of a modular synth, and "Piano Thru OP-1" tells you straight up that it's 88 keys fed through the Teenage Engineering synth/sampler/drum machine, offering a Cage-ian ambiance. 

Matt McCleskey, World Enough and Time
Ann Arbor's Matt McCleskey has been working on the songs for what appears to be his debut album, World Enough and Time. The earliest songs were written before the pandemic; several more were composed in the wake of it. During the early days of the pandemic, McCleskey says, "In those early months, as time seemed both sped up and strangely paused, I also went back in time in a sense—reading old poets I had first encountered long before, when life was a dreamscape still to come. Shakespeare, Donne, Herrick, Andrew Marvell (who first said “World enough, and Time” in the 1650s), Burns, Blake, Shelley, Hopkins. There are references to some of them in these songs."

While some of the inspirations for the nine-song album are from long ago, the music is contemporary Americana. There's a mix of roots rock, country, and folk—and I wouldn't be surprised if McCleskey is a huge Springsteen fan: The way he growls the words and clips enunciations immediately recall the Boss. 

Lauren Blackford, One Too Many Times (Loft Sessions)
In April 2024, Milan's Lauren Blackford released what I called a "fantastic six-song debut, One Too Many Times," that "mixes guitar pop and a studio producer's sheen for a Swift-ian romp through relationship travails." (For the English majors reading this: that's Taylor Swift, not Jonathan Swift.) Her strong voice mixed with radio-ready tunes made me think we had a local pop star in the making—and that still may be the case. But Blackford's new release features those same songs in stripped-down settings—just acoustic guitar or piano as accompaniment, recorded in an Ann Arbor loft—and the tunes take on a new maturity and weight. While Blackford's future might be in rock clubs—or even Little Caesars Arena—she's such a strong songwriter and performer that her music would also be at home at a venue like The Ark.

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