In a remarkable turn for one of experimental music's most restless voices, Jason Kahn's When Your Way Gets Dark presents him in a stripped-down yet deeply potent setting: acoustic guitar, harmonium and voice. Known for his extensive work in electronics, percussion, field recording and extended voice improvisation, Kahn here turns inward, letting the raw resonance of string, reed and breath frame a more elemental expression.

Kahn's prior output-solo and collaborative-has often embraced circuit-bending, "glitch" interventions, environmental capture and radical vocal gesture. For example his 2015 vocal release Songline showcased long sustained vocal drones, strained whines and an almost pathological excavation of the voice as instrument, "shedding connotation until only vibration is left." Similarly, early guitar/voice works like Circle (2018) find Kahn "circling around recurring ideas" of improvisation, voice and resonator guitar via an abstracted blues mindset.

On When Your Way Gets Dark, one senses a backward and forward motion at once: backward in the sense that acoustic guitar and harmonium are more "traditional" instruments in Kahn's vocabulary compared to his modular-synth or contact-mic terrain; forward in the sense that his eccentric vocal style-its microtonal slurs, phlegmy glottal shocks, breath-sucked intonations-remains as idiosyncratic, uncompromising and intimately physical as ever. His guitar work here does not settle into folk or singer-songwriter tropes, but often feels like an extension of his voice: plucked strings resonate like vocal cooings or garglings; harmonium drones become vocal shadows in a room of his own design.

The choice of Tainan, Taiwan as recording location suggests a performative immediacy: the acoustics of the space, the moment of capture, the artist "in the room" rather than hidden behind electronics. Such clarity allows Kahn's vocal personality-eccentric, vulnerable, confrontational-to emerge unmasked. In this setting his voice does more than accompany the instruments; it sculpts the air, fills the room, contends with the decay of the harmonium and the sustain of the guitar. One hears the "way getting dark" not as a mere title but as a process: passages of clarity slipping into spectral loops, tonal centres destabilising, voice and instrument locked in a subtle dance of retreat and return.

For listeners familiar with Kahn's louder, more gadget-rich work, this album offers something like a concentrated essence: the assets of his extended practice (improvisation, architecture of sound, voice as object) filtered through acoustic means. It's not a retreat into "simple" instrumentation but a re-examination of his core sonic concerns in a less mediated, more exposed environment. The eccentricities of his voice-its aberrant punctuation, its glissandi into micro-intervals, its entanglement with silence-are highlighted all the more by the sparseness of the instrumentation.

In sum, When Your Way Gets Dark stands as a significant entry in Kahn's catalogue: a work that retains his radical sensibility while opening a new acoustic chapter, where murmur and strum, drone and breath, vulnerability and insistence converge. It invites the listener not merely to hear but to inhabit the space Kahn creates-a space where his voice might risk being exposed, but where the exposure becomes its power.