On his Nonesuch Records debut album, Over That Road I’m Bound, out today, songwriter and multi-instrumentalist Joachim Cooder uses the plain-spoken songs of country-music progenitor and banjo player Uncle Dave Macon as a jumping off point, tinkering with the lyrics and reworking melodies for his chosen instrument: an electric mbira. Cooder culled songs from Macon’s vast catalog and recorded them with his band and special guests: Ry Cooder, Rayna Gellert, Juliette Commagere, Sam Gendel, Glenn Patscha, Amir Yaghmai, Dan Gellert, and Vieux Farka Touré. "Warm, uplifting, and quietly spectacular," says Uncut. "A buoyant and joyful long-player," says Mojo. A new video for the album track "Heartaching Blues" may be seen here.

Sam Gendel’s new album, DRM, is out today on Nonesuch Records. The follow-up to his Nonesuch debut, Satin Doll, released earlier this year, DRM features Gendel’s solo musical experiments with vintage instruments such as a forty-year-old Electro Harmonix DRM32 drum machine, antique synthesizers, and a sixty-year-old nylon-string guitar—accompanied by his voice. The album includes one cover song: Lil Nas X’s “Old Town Road,” which Gendel interprets as an instrumental, playing the melody on an old German analogue synthesizer. Also out today are short films, one for each track on the album, directed by Marcella Cytrynowicz; you can watch them here.

Mountain Man has released Mountain Man Sings Simple Gifts, the latest in its series of cover singles, featuring its version of the Shaker hymn. "'Simple Gifts' is one of those incredible songs that transforms you while you sing it,” says the trio. "It's like an incantation, and it was a joy to record."

The soundtrack to the Tim Burton–directed film of Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street, first released on Nonesuch in 2007, will receive its first-ever vinyl edition on November 13, 2020, in a two-LP set, available to pre-order now. The film, which won the Golden Globe for Best Picture, is an adaptation by John Logan of Stephen Sondheim and Hugh Wheeler’s musical, starring Johnny Depp, Helena Bonham Carter, and the late Alan Rickman. "Something close to a masterpiece, a work of extreme—I am tempted to say evil—genius," exclaimed the New York Times' A.O. Scott. "This Sweeney is a bloody wonder," raved Rolling Stone's Peter Travers, "intimate and epic, horrific and heart-rending as it flies on the wings of Sondheim's most thunderously exciting score."

Composer Sarah Kirkland Snider’s Mass for the Endangered, is out now on New Amsterdam and Nonesuch Records. A video for “Alleluia” from the Mass, the third video for the project made by Deborah Johnson / CandyStations, can be seen here. Snider’s Mass, with a libretto by poet/writer Nathaniel Bellows, is a celebration of, and an elegy for, the natural world—animals, plants, insects, the planet itself—an appeal for greater awareness, urgency, and action. Originally commissioned by Trinity Church Wall Street, this recording features the English vocal ensemble Gallicantus conducted by Gabriel Crouch.

Tristan Perich’s Drift Multiply, for 50 violins and 50-channel 1-bit electronics, will be released November 13, 2020, on New Amsterdam and Nonesuch Records, and is available to preorder now. The piece, Perich’s largest work to date, is conducted by Douglas Perkins. Scored as one hundred individual lines of music, the piece blends violins and speakers into a cascading tapestry of tone, harmony, and noise. The violins perform from sheet music, while the speakers are each connected to custom-built circuit boards programmed to output 1-bit audio, the most basic digital waveforms made of just ones and zeroes.

k.d. lang's 2008 Nonesuch album, Watershed, declared "a masterpiece" by the Times, will be released on vinyl for the first time on November 20, and is available to pre-order now. As the title suggests, Watershed represented a milestone in lang’s career. For the first time, she assumed the role of producer, as well as writer, singer, and multi-instrumentalist. “Watershed is like a culmination of everything I’ve done," lang said; "there’s a little bit of jazz, a little country, a little of the Ingénue sound, a little Brazilian touch ... I didn’t feel the need to be genre-specific because this experience felt so wide open."

Multidisciplinary abstractivist and auteur Rob Mazurek will release a new album with Exploding Star Orchestra, Dimensional Stardust, via International Anthem / Nonesuch Records on November 20, 2020. The album track "A Wrinkle in Time Sets Concentric Circles Reeling" is available today; the video by Mikel Patrick Avery can be seen here. Mazurek arranged his pieces for eleven musicians and commissioned his long-time lyrics collaborator Damon Locks to draft original texts for the songs. The album recalls an array of Mazurek’s symphonic­ influences, from Béla Bartók to Morton Feldman to Gil Evans to Sun Ra to Pedro Santos to Bill Dixon to The Art Ensemble of Chicago. Opting to focus on tight ensemble orchestration over passages of open improvisation, he distills an orchestra of explosive improvisers into a graceful group exercise in melodic minimalism.

Brad Mehldau's new album, Suite: April 2020, is now available on CD and standard vinyl, following the release of the digital and limited-edition deluxe vinyl editions earlier this year. While sheltering at home with his family in the Netherlands during the COVID-19 pandemic this spring, Mehldau wrote twelve new songs about what he was experiencing; he was able to record them safely in an Amsterdam studio, along with interpretations of three tunes that mean a great deal to him. One thousand numbered and signed copies of the deluxe edition were sold, with a minimum of $90 from each sale donated to the Jazz Foundation of America’s COVID-19 Musician’s Emergency Fund. Brad Mehldau has several solo concerts in Europe ahead.

Vagabon has released a new version of her song "Home Soon," featured in the new Lionsgate film Antebellum, starring Janelle Monáe. The song was originally released on Vagabon's critically acclaimed self-titled album, which Clash called an “indie-pop masterpiece.” The new mix can be heard here.

Rostam, in celebration of the three-year anniversary of his Nonesuch debut, Half-Light, has released an acoustic version of the album's title track. The song, which was originally released as part of a compilation album benefitting Fair Fight, features Rostam solo and multi-tracked on guitar, drums, piano, hammond organ, and bass.

Sam Amidon's self-titled album will be released on Nonesuch on October 23, 2020, with the vinyl due January 22, 2021. The album, which Amidon produced and considers the fullest realization to date of his artistic vision, comprises his radical reworkings of mostly traditional folk songs, performed with his frequent band, multi-instrumentalist Shahzad Ismaily and drummer Chris Vatalaro, along with saxophonist and label mate Sam Gendel, guitarist Bert Cools, bassist Ruth Goller, and Amidon’s wife, Beth Orton, who adds vocals on three songs. Pre-order to download "Maggie" now and get a signed print. You can watch the "Maggie" video here. Tickets are available for Amidon's October 3 concert and live stream from Kings Place in London.