Wilder Maker

Smoking the Bunny is the second in a planned trilogy of records by Brooklyn based avant-indie outfit Wilder Maker. It is sonically and conceptually ambitious, expansive, groovy, poetic, cinematic –– both strange and familiar. At times, this episodic record sidles alongside Broadcast or Oren Ambarchi or Tortoise, at others Ry Cooder or Paul Simon. Aesthetic juxtapositions are the order of the day but nothing here feels disjointed or without intention. And despite those aforementioned antecedents, Smoking the Bunny is the sole inhabitant of its own distinct universe, one characterized by an ambience of wonder and active questioning. It is a record that wanders endlessly but is never aimless.

“I hope that ultimately this trilogy will be viewed as marking a time when I liberated myself from my influences and made something no one else would or could or should have made,” principle songwriter and vocalist Gabriel Birnbaum says. “I don’t even know if I should have made it.”

Not unlike with Talk Talk’s Spirit of Eden and Laughing Stock, the editing process was treated as a creative enterprise when making Smoking the Bunny.

Starting mostly with full- or partial-band improvisations, Birnbaum then aggressively edited, condensed, and manipulated those recordings, dividing them “according to what time of night they felt like.” Among the players on this record are Birnbaum’s usual bandmates Nick Jost, Sean Mullins, and Adam Brisbin, as well as Birnbaum’s longest standing collaborator and Wilder Maker auxiliary member Katie Von Schleicher who acts as engineer, guitar and keyboard player and vocalist. Von Schleicher’s singing is notably sometimes performed directly and sometimes sampled, processed and looped by Birnbaum. This coaxing of multivalence is characteristic of Smoking the Bunny.

Expanding the group in novel ways, Birnbaum invited a host of new collaborators including guitarist Chuck Johnson, saxophonist Joseph Shabason, trumpet player Cole Kamen-Green, composer-harpist Kitba (bec el-saleh), drummer Will Shore, avant garde percussionist Levy Lorenzo, and violinist Macie Stewart, who is known as half of FINOM, a member of Jeff Tweedy’s band, and for her collaborations with Lia Kohl, Ken Vandermark, Makaya McCraven and many others.

As with its predecessor, 2025’s The Streets Like Beds Still Warm, the initial sounds that populate this record were captured pristinely at Figure 8 Recordings in Brooklyn before Birnbaum ran much of it through tape machines and guitar pedals and then back into computers for further editing. While “collage” might be an accurate term for explaining how this work was made, the result is anything but patchwork. Instead, the listener is met with an extraordinarily vivid sense of narrative. Smoking the Bunny concerns the same character with whom we started the evening on The Streets Like Beds Still Warm. At this point, we follow him into the small hours of the night, into extreme drunkenness and blacking out and, through that vortex, into his own memories which are loosely arrayed in hotel rooms with numbers, which are reflected in the song titles, e.g. “Bachelor Garbage (Room 12)” and “No Lark (Room 9).” This hypnogogic tale of a man wandering drunk through hotel rooms is itself, of course, metaphor, as the lyrics ultimately grapple with concepts of identity, both positive and negative, and a running theme of confronting one’s own limitations in various forms of weakness, failure and death. “That may sound pessimistic,” Birnbaum says, “and maybe it is, but I see it as an inevitable correction for the infinity that is a part of young life. One can’t be disappointed without having first hoped for everything.” In this spirit, Birnbaum identifies Smoking the Bunny as a “midlife record” for its equally weighted forward- and backward-looking essence, for its reflections on family and mortality, frustration and failure. In fact Smoking the Bunny features a few field recordings, so-to-speak, of Birnbaum’s parents speaking, his father’s voice fragmented and haunted on the particularly stirring “A Drunkard of Days.”

With the narrative generally in place from the start, after chopping up and reassembling the various sessions and improvisations, Birnbaum improvised with his voice, eventually comping together disparate vocal improvisations to form a final vocal melody, only then writing lyrics to those melodies, eventually adding the final vocal performances. This novel process seems to have ensured a deeply integrated and organic sense in the performances –– sung words that are equally representative of both sign and signified. This idea might be expanded to categorize the whole of Smoking the Bunny, a record overflowing with meaning and intention, overflowing with sounds that are themselves symbols and songs that constellate, fragmentary but consummate, very much like a year of dreaming.