The new Ches Smith album, Clone Row, unfolds with a customary scrambled-signal urgency. Guitars jangle in loose accord, or jostle against one another like keys on a chain. Bass and drums lock into a series of grooves that lurch and swerve even as they push ahead. Everything feels precisely calibrated but also wild and raw — fitting, for an artist whose work collides avant-garde improvisation with elements of postpunk, electronic music and Haitian folkloric ritual, just for starters.
Clone Row — it’s a band as well as an album — features guitarists Mary Halvorson and Liberty Ellman and bassist Nick Dunston. These are a few of the many intrepid musicians that Smith has brought into his personal orbit. When we talked earlier this month, he had just come off a European tour with Weird of Mouth, an experimental trio with saxophonist Mette Rasmussen and pianist Craig Taborn that released a compelling self-titled album last year; he’d also done some dates on the continent with guitarist Marc Ribot, one of his steadiest collaborators over the last 20 years.
Ribot wrote the liner notes for Clone Row, blending insight with irreverence. “This definitely ain’t your father’s guitar band,” he writes. “It’s as if I’m hearing a Jim Hall concert in which one of us did a lot of mushrooms, or… some post-punk Dave Brubeck post-trip-hop experiment with classical form.”
I’m looking forward to experiencing Clone Row at the 2026 Big Ears Festival, where I’ve previously seen Smith present his projects Laugh Ash and We All Break. Aspects of both of those, it turns out, led him to this new music. We get into that, and much more in this conversation. Please enjoy.
