Jason Calhoun, Jon Samuels, Ava Mirzadegan, Shande
Calvary United Methodist Church
Philadelphia, PA
Oct. 24, 2026
The “devotional” tag often gets used in jest on Bandcamp, but last night’s show at Calvary United Methodist, presented by FM Philly, was sincerely evocative and solemn. Gathered together beneath that rain-damaged domed roof, the occasion was the release of a new album by Philly’s own Jason Calhoun, an ambient musician, composer, sound artist and improviser who also plays in the band Hour, itself a mostly-instrumental collective of musicians with a mix of classical and punk backgrounds. That new Calhoun album, revelations of divine love, was available at the merch table, though Calhoun’s performance seemed to be spontaneously constructed, in spiritual alignment with the music on wax: a just-over-thirty minutes improvised composition of arresting beauty.
Calhoun’s performance began with carefully-selected synthesizer sonorities — a plaintive, almost choral central sequence of soft, resonant, sustained whole notes, mostly open fifths and suspensions — which repeated, with subtle alterations, throughout the bulk of the music that followed. What was added ran the gamut: torrents of detailed and dense tones, downpour-esque noise, heavily-effected field recordings (that may have been rain, or snoring, or traffic, or any number of easily-neglected naturally beautiful sounds), radio interference and snippets of unidentified monologue, and passages of seemingly-random electrical chirping, suggestive of a colony of insects navigating a storm. People near me took their shoes off and laid down — I spied two friends, one resting in a pew, the other underneath it – and thought of the Passages concert series (which I’ve covered before) and imagined that Calhoun would be a perfect fit. Half an hour certainly seemed too little. One of my favorite things about witnessing a performance of this music, which can leave you with the feeling of a brain bath or total physical body recalibration, is watching those extended moments when Calhoun sits back and listens, concentrating deeply, allowing himself to feel the whiz and whir of the machines before him, imagining where to take the music next; it conjures the philosophical image of the creator not as a machinist merely creating the machine and letting it run, but of a thinker, actively thinking a thought into existence.
Also notable was a solo set, preceding Calhoun’s, by the guitarist Jon Samuels, best known for playing guitar with MJ Lenderman & The Wind and bass with Philly’s own Friendship. Also lasting about thirty minutes in length, and also an unbroken improvisation, Samuels performed with greater irreverence and fidgety physicality, stalking the stage alone with his sneakers occasional squeaking, his great shock of hair hiding most of his face throughout. This was heavily-processed fingerstyle electric guitar, mostly reversed and ring-mod’d into debauched dialtone drone; the signal was marvelously mutilated and mangled – often unrecognizable as obviously guitar – and there were great stretches where Samuels’ choices of bent notes, pitch clusters and semi-random guessing and searching gave an impression of bizarrely pantomiming rock tropes. Around twenty minutes in, he settled into a D minor tonality – mostly switching between Bb and a thirdless A – activating the chords with a metal spring, which, combined with the reverse delay and other effects, had a stuttering, flickering and menacing quality, almost something Godspeed You! Black Emperor would write; for about four minutes, these long slow swells, this percussive metal machine violin music felt like a genuine ushering in, a dark unexplored corner suddenly cast in cautious light. Devotional, indeed.
