The Compound 76

Also see digital release Le Pantoum 46 by Peals!

If you picked up this LP because you know the name Peals, consider yourself lucky, and consider yourself sold. You already understand that, for four years near the beginning of the last decade, William Cashion and Bruce Willen created quietly radiant instrumental music from two tessellated guitars, a few modest synths, and a slew of percussive and noisy toys, like walkie-talkies or the things that gave the pair their handle, bells. You’ve probably already been lifted or settled by Peals, had the state of your nerves shifted by these homemade cathedrals of sound. This 2016 live recording—from the band’s next-to-last show, at least for now, cut in an artist-run space called The Compound in their hometown of Baltimore—will allow them to do that again and again.

But if you picked up this album because the cover simply appeals to you or because a friend who you now owe gifted you a copy, it’s worth telling you a little about why you might have previously missed Peals. First, in the ever-reductive sense of the phrase, Peals was a side-project of two bassists known best for their other livewire and loud Baltimore bands: Future Islands for Cashion, Double Dagger for Willen. Technically, Double Dagger—an absolutely electrifying post-punk trio, if you haven’t heard them, either—had reached its end just as Cashion and Willen began talking about trying to make music together, but that context never really mattered. Side-projects often get relegated to also-ran status, no matter how different they are from the motherships, no matter how much notice they warrant on their own. From the outside, Peals were almost always seen as some in-between thing.

Speaking of the liminal, Peals emerged at an inconvenient moment for their sort of instrumental wonder. The noisy international explorations of great acts like Yellow Swans, Growing, and Fuck Buttons (all duos, mind you) had mostly subsided before Peals played their first show in April 2012. And the current bloom in New Age and ambient music was very much still germinating, those terms still catching substantial side-eye from arbiters of acceptability. That was steadily changing, however, as Peals offered this set in September 2016, with the United States unknowingly at the edge of successive upheavals that would increasingly make such sounds feel like requisite medicine.

Writing to you from 2026, then, this recording does not feel at all out-of-time, like some overlooked gem that was simply swallowed by its moment. It sounds relevant, welcoming, welcome. These 38 seamless minutes have clear predecessors: Manuel Göttsching’s E2-E4, Cluster and Eno’s Cologne dalliances, the way Midwest Emo could sound smarter than its lyrics read. I hear bits of old spirituals and Appalachian banjo music, too, nested inside the guitars. 

But the way Cashion and Willen stitched it all together ignored any rules of what this music was supposed to be, so that very gentle passages abutted joyously jarring ones, so that the saxophone line that unexpectedly offers the denouement here feels as though it were birthed by a symphony of chattering guitars. There is a prevailing inclination to write about somewhat soft instrumental music as “ambient,” and it’s true that the form was something of a springboard for Peals. But this isn’t an ignorable sound; it’s meant for you to inhabit, to take a walk around, to notice.

For either their first or second show, Cashion and Willen brought along a table lamp—the kind of old-fashioned thing you’d find in a thrift store, with a bulbous brass base and a thick shade that seemed much too big. They toted it to every subsequent gig, placing it between them on a table or the floor. It made the whole thing feel homey, as if they’d invited you into their living room to relax and listen, to sit still in some different space for a spell and walk away new. When Peals started, their Baltimore scene was known for paroxysms and energy—Dan Deacon, Ponytail, Ecstatic Sunshine, Future Islands, Double Dagger, and on and on. This was a calming project, a comedown for band and audience alike. The world hasn’t slowed or softened in the last decade. And Peals, heard here just before what we can hope is only a decade-long pause, still offers another option, a way out, an antidote. 

Grayson Haver Currin
Bar-K Ranch, Colorado
April 2026