Gideon Broshy — Nest
Gideon Broshy
Nest
Release date: September 26, 2025
On Friday, September 26, 2025, the composer, pianist, and producer Gideon Broshy, who builds webs and clouds from sharp figures using improvisation, synthesis, and MIDI, announces his debut record, Nest (Out September 26, 2025), via New Amsterdam Records. Nest features TIGUE’s Matt Evans (drums), the Silkroad Ensemble's Mantawoman (dulcimer), Hub New Music's Gleb Kanasevich (clarinet), and Grammy winner William Brittelle (production).
The 12 tracks on Nest gather harpsichords, synthesizers, celestas, dulcimers, pianos, and software instruments into bright, angular assemblages and dense swarms. Tracing the erratic contours of ordinary feeling, thought, and encounter, Broshy’s unique practice blurs distinctions between improvisation, composition, and production, and between human and mechanical.
Formed over three years through the gradual accretion of improvised and electronic material, Nest is tactile and spatial, jagged and lyrical, precise and atmospheric. “An ecology of gestures and objects, routes and relations, this work is attuned to the oblique dynamism of the everyday: life feels angular, when the flow of experience meets the disorder of the social world,” explains Broshy.
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About Nest
“A nest is intricate and dense — branches placed, piece by piece, in knotty arrangements. It evokes the branching thoughts of an anxious episode, or the complexity of a network — and the forms of intimacy and enclosure that carry us through the ordinary discord of social life,” explains Broshy.
The angular, densely overgrown world of Nest is the product of an iterative process of assembly, disassembly, and reassembly, balancing indeterminate spontaneity with deft precision. Broshy generated material through improvisation, synthesis, and MIDI, broke it into fragments, and arranged them meticulously in free time. He tells us, “In Nest, oblique musical objects and strands collide, intertwine, and aggregate to form heterogeneous textures and fields, swarms and scenes. I treat composition as a form of assembly, here with shards and flecks, in bursts and smears, thrown together into emergent forms. It’s feeling out curves and bends and following them into their entanglements and immersions, the indeterminate energetics that compose kaleidoscopic worlds and selves.”
The piano is at the core of Broshy’s gestural improvisatory language, and he employed a constellation of keyboards on Nest. Acoustic instruments like harpsichord, celeste, piano, and Rhodes combine with analog and digital hardware synthesizers, Sculpture (a software engine that simulates the physical properties of a string), granular synthesis, and MIDI instruments emulating Rhodes, celeste, dulcimer, koto, and kalimba. The use of software doppelgängers in concert with their “real” counterparts — and unpredictable MIDI operations that contort and stretch material to create complex musical objects — folded human and mechanical elements together in hybrid interplay.
Collaborations with Matt Evans (drums), Mantawoman (dulcimer), and Gleb Kanasevich (clarinet) saw Broshy and co. employing diverse forms of collaborative improvisation in the studio. Once all material had been recorded, “the assembly of each piece entwined composition and production with editing and mixing,” says Broshy. Spatial and sonic choices snapped into place in the project’s later stages, through close collaborations with producer William Brittelle and mix engineer Michael Hammond.
Kanasevich’s clarinet skids across the faceted electronic surface of “String”. Celeste, harpsichord, and synths curl around each other like spindle fibers, gathering thickness and texture, before the clarinet breaks through, triggering a shimmering cascade of electroacoustic flourishes, clusters, and points.
The title track and centerpiece, “Nest,” marks a broadening of formal scope. It spotlights Mantawoman’s yangqin, a Chinese hammered dulcimer, alongside harpsichord, celeste, Rhodes, and piano; their software emulations; and an eclectic palette of synths. Manta, who is internationally recognized for bringing the yangqin to pop and contemporary music, introduces a halting, elastic theme that snaps into pulse before unraveling into loose detritus. As intricate constellations of plucked, struck, and smeared gesture carve out an expansive sonic topography, we encounter a clearing here, a precarious ridge there — locking back into propulsive rhythm only to be swept into a textural deluge or crumble into hazy particulate.
A bubbling swirl of pianos, drums, and synths, “Plateaus” opens with tentative pokes and darts that burst into frenetic flights of intertwining gesture. Conceived as a structured improvisation for piano and drums performed live with percussionist Matt Evans, it fans out into a diffuse field of pianistic and percussive events as copied fragments proliferate. Originally a duo performance, it swells into an engorged, hyperreal swarm, synths squealing overhead.
A study in multiplicity, “Clocks” features six harpsichords, celeste, and electronics. Its imitative, canon-like formations stitch together into plucked multitudes evoking flocks or coruscating foam. As delicate harpsichord threads coil into a topology of knots, burnt at the edges by distortion, we hover over the perceptual edge between discrete strands and textural gestalt, one and many, figure and ground.
Broshy’s impulse towards density and collage reaches a saturation point with “Folds,” the frothy album closer, in which the sonic aperture of the album expands to include bit-crushed pianos, granular clouds, and field recordings capturing the anxious banalities of everyday life. A point of frenzied accumulation and dream-stunned sprawl, “Folds” peters out in a wisp of mechanical noise.
On Nest, Broshy attends to an erratic “angularity" in everyday life, and the dense social entanglements that compose the self. He explains: “If there is a phenomenological impulse in Nest, it’s to trace the immanent shapes and surfaces of the everyday. To sketch or map their routes and connections, their accumulations and multiplicities. A sharp breath, an empty pause, a dragging undertow, a disjuncture in time or pitch or space. To play with shapes, to get at the shape of things.”
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Track list
Stutter
String
Spot
Crumple
Nest
Clocks
Slash
Plateaus
Spurty
Undertow
Meshy
Folds
Credits
Composed and Produced by Gideon Broshy
Harpsichords, Celestes, Rhodes, Pianos, Synths, Programming: Gideon Broshy
Yangqin: Mantawoman
Clarinet: Gleb Kanasevich
Drums: Matt Evans
Recorded at Brooklyn Recording, the Juilliard School, L’Aurore, Dreamland Recording Studios, and home by Andy Taub, Jeff Berman, Dan Gengenbach, Geoffrey Papin, Ariel Shafir, and Gideon Broshy
Production by William Brittelle
Mixed at Figure 8 Recording by Michael Hammond
Mastered by Zach Hanson
Artwork and Design by Gideon Broshy
Silkscreen Printing by Brad Ewing at Marginal Editions
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