Gary Lucas and Lukas Ligeti enter the unknown, where free jazz, psychedelic space, avant-garde electricity and spontaneous invention become one living sound.
There are albums that announce themselves with a statement, and there are albums that simply open a door. Omnidirectional, the new collaboration between American guitarist, songwriter and composer Gary Lucas and Austrian-American composer, drummer and percussionist Lukas Ligeti, belongs firmly to the second category. It does not ask the listener to follow a predetermined route. It offers no comfortable map, no fixed coordinates, no reassuring signposts. Instead, it invites us into a musical landscape where direction is constantly changing and where sound seems to be discovering itself at the very moment we hear it.
Released digitally by Cuneiform Records on July 31, 2026, Omnidirectional consists of four pieces: three extended improvisations and a radically atmospheric reimagining of Alice Coltrane’s “Journey in Satchidananda.” Lucas plays guitars and effects, Ligeti drums and percussion, while the entire album was recorded live at EastSide Sound in New York City and mixed by Marc Urselli. There are no overdubs. The music exists as an encounter between two musicians in real time. And that fact is essential to understanding the record.
This is not an album in which improvisation is merely an ornament placed around compositions. Improvisation is the architecture itself. Gary Lucas has spent decades moving restlessly between musical worlds—blues, rock, avant-garde music, jazz, folk, classical experimentation, psychedelia and other forms of sonic exploration. His long history includes collaborations with artists such as Captain Beefheart and Jeff Buckley, but his work has never been easily contained by the boundaries of any single genre. Lukas Ligeti arrives from another equally expansive musical universe, bringing together contemporary composition, African rhythmic traditions, jazz, electronics and experimental music.
Put these two musicians together and the result is not a conventional guitar-and-drums duo. It is an ecosystem.
Music without a compass
The title Omnidirectional feels almost perfectly suited to the music. There is movement everywhere. Lucas’s guitar does not simply establish riffs and Ligeti does not merely accompany them. The two instruments continually provoke, answer, interrupt, mirror and transform one another. A guitar phrase can emerge like a fragment of blues memory before dissolving into an abstract electronic shimmer. A percussion pattern can begin with something apparently physical and earthy, only to become a field of shifting accents and polyrhythmic tension.
The music breathes in several directions simultaneously. That is perhaps the great fascination of the album: although everything is improvised, nothing feels random. The musicians listen intensely. They recognize possibilities inside one another’s gestures and respond before the moment disappears. A sound becomes a rhythm; a rhythm becomes a pulse; a pulse becomes an atmosphere; an atmosphere suddenly breaks open.
The result is music of extraordinary instability—and that instability is precisely its beauty. Lucas has spoken of his long musical relationship with Ligeti, which developed through performances in New York and earlier collaborations, including Ligeti’s work with Lucas’s long-running band Gods and Monsters. Their duo eventually found its own identity through performances at New York’s Tonic and The Stone, spaces deeply associated with experimental and avant-garde music.
Those years of playing together matter. Omnidirectional does not sound like two strangers meeting in a studio and deciding to improvise. It sounds like two musicians who already know the language of each other’s instincts.
“Phlogiston” — the first eruption
The album opens with “Phlogiston,” a thirteen-minute voyage that immediately establishes the record’s elemental character. There is something almost alchemical about the piece. Lucas’s guitar can sound metallic, volcanic, blues-inflected or cosmic within the same extended movement, while Ligeti surrounds and challenges him with percussion that refuses to remain in a single rhythmic dimension.
Rather than progressing in a conventional verse-and-chorus form, “Phlogiston” develops through accumulation and transformation. The musicians seem to discover the shape of the piece through the pressure of playing.
It is music with heat. The guitar becomes both instrument and texture, while percussion functions as both pulse and atmosphere. One moment seems to grow out of the previous one, but the next is never entirely predictable. There is a physical quality to the performance, an impression that the listener is hearing two musicians moving through the room together, reacting to every vibration. That sense of physical presence is one of the album’s defining strengths.
“Journey in Satchidananda” — a spiritual center
If the opening track throws the listener into the album’s turbulent universe, “Journey in Satchidananda” provides a different kind of gravity. Alice Coltrane’s composition is one of the landmarks of spiritual and exploratory jazz, and Lucas and Ligeti approach it not as a museum piece but as living material.
Their version becomes spacious, mysterious and almost dreamlike. The original composition’s spiritual dimension remains present, but here it is refracted through Lucas’s guitar language and Ligeti’s extraordinarily flexible percussion. Instead of simply recreating the atmosphere associated with Coltrane’s recording, the duo searches for another route into the piece.
The result feels less like a cover than an invocation. There is a sense of suspended time, as though the music has temporarily escaped the ordinary relationship between rhythm and duration. Lucas’s guitar can seem to hover above Ligeti’s percussion, while Ligeti creates a constantly moving ground beneath it.
The choice of Alice Coltrane is significant. The album’s broader musical references include the free-jazz and psychedelic worlds surrounding artists such as Pharaoh Sanders, whose 1969 Karma was an important inspiration for the project. “Journey in Satchidananda,” originally released in 1971, places Lucas and Ligeti directly inside that lineage of spiritual searching, modal exploration and musical freedom. Yet they do not attempt to reproduce the past. They converse with it.
“Over 6 Million Served” — surreal energy
The title “Over 6 Million Served” introduces another side of the album: playful, surreal and slightly anarchic.
At more than ten minutes, the piece has enough space to allow ideas to appear, disappear and return in altered forms. The music can feel almost cinematic in its ability to create scenes without words. Lucas’s effects transform the guitar into something larger than a conventional six-string instrument, while Ligeti’s percussion constantly changes the perspective.
Here, the album’s psychedelic dimension becomes particularly vivid. There are moments when the guitar seems to be searching for a melody buried somewhere underneath the noise. Then the percussion shifts the ground and the search begins again. This is one of the great pleasures of Omnidirectional: it never allows the listener to settle completely. It keeps the ears awake.
“Whorls Within Whirls” — the spiral continues
The album closes with “Whorls Within Whirls,” its longest piece at more than fifteen minutes. The title itself could serve as a description of the entire project. A whorl is already a circular movement; a whirl suggests turbulence and motion. Put them together and you have a perfect image for Lucas and Ligeti’s musical method: movement inside movement, sound inside sound, rhythm spiraling into texture and texture returning to rhythm.
“Whorls Within Whirls” feels like the album’s final expansion. Instead of offering a conventional conclusion, the piece seems to widen the musical horizon. Lucas’s guitar can become jagged and incandescent, then unexpectedly lyrical. Ligeti’s percussion moves from recognizable rhythmic language toward increasingly abstract combinations of resonance, pulse and silence.
The piece is long enough for the musicians to inhabit the music rather than simply perform it. And that distinction is important. Omnidirectional is not about demonstrating how quickly or dramatically two virtuoso musicians can improvise. Its deeper interest lies in listening—the act of listening so closely that one musician’s sound becomes the material for the other’s next decision.
A conversation built on trust
At the center of the album is trust. Lucas and Ligeti have known one another musically for years, and that familiarity makes this kind of extreme improvisation possible. Lucas has described Ligeti as a collaborator whose abilities as a percussionist, composer and sonic explorer immediately impressed him. Their relationship developed through different configurations before ultimately becoming the duo heard here.
That history can be heard in the record. There is no hesitation between them. They leave space for one another, but they also know when to attack the silence. They understand when a phrase needs to be extended and when it needs to be abandoned. They know when to create density and when to allow a single sound to hang in the air.
This is improvisation as conversation—not polite conversation, but the kind that becomes more revealing because neither participant knows exactly where it will lead.
The Gary Lucas guitar: blues memory transformed
For listeners familiar with Lucas’s career, one of the most compelling elements of Omnidirectional is the way his deep relationship with the blues remains audible even when the music travels far beyond traditional blues language.
There is often a physical quality to his guitar playing—a sense of attack, bend, distortion and resonance—that recalls the expressive roots of electric blues. But those elements are repeatedly pulled into stranger territory.
The blues does not disappear. It becomes DNA. Lucas has described his broader approach as combining improvisational and avant-garde elements while retaining the “twang” of the blues. That philosophy is particularly revealing here, because Omnidirectional does not abandon musical history in pursuit of abstraction. Instead, it takes historical materials and allows them to mutate.
A blues gesture can become psychedelic. A psychedelic texture can become free jazz. Free jazz can become a kind of ambient soundscape. And suddenly a noise that initially seemed alien begins to sound strangely melodic.
Lukas Ligeti: percussion as architecture
Ligeti’s contribution is equally central. His percussion does not function simply as a rhythmic foundation for the guitar. It creates architecture. He is a composer as much as a drummer, and his musical background encompasses Western contemporary composition, African music, jazz, electronics and experimental practices. His work has also included collaborations and projects across Africa, Europe and North America, contributing to a musical vocabulary that is unusually broad.
That breadth is important on Omnidirectional. Ligeti can make the percussion sound intimate and immediate, then suddenly enormous. He can establish a pattern and almost immediately undermine it. He can leave silence between gestures or build layers of activity that transform the guitar’s role. His percussion is therefore not “behind” Lucas. It is beside him. Sometimes opposite him. Sometimes inside the same sonic space.
New York as an invisible third musician
There is also a sense of New York embedded in the album. The sessions were recorded at EastSide Sound, Lucas’s favored New York studio, with Marc Urselli engineering and mixing. The city has always encouraged collisions between musical traditions, and Omnidirectional feels like a product of that culture of collision.
Blues and avant-garde music. Rock and free jazz. Composition and improvisation. Acoustic tradition and electronic possibility. Old musical memories and entirely new sounds. Lucas has lived in New York’s West Village since 1977 and has described the city’s multicultural atmosphere as an important influence on his music. In his recent JazzBlues.EU interview, he spoke about the way sounds from Latin, Asian, West Indian, African and industrial traditions have permeated his musical imagination.
That sensibility is present here even when no specific cultural reference is obvious. The city seems to be somewhere in the background—the restless city that never quite stops listening.
An album that refuses to stand still
There is a wonderful contradiction at the heart of Omnidirectional. It is completely improvised, yet it feels purposeful. It is spontaneous, yet the musicians clearly possess an extraordinary command of musical form. It can be beautiful and abrasive within the same passage. It can sound ancient and futuristic.
It can approach silence before erupting into noise. And above everything else, it remains alive. That may be the most important word for this album. Alive. The four tracks are not fixed objects so much as records of musical encounters. Because there are no overdubs and the performances were captured live in the studio, the listener is hearing a particular moment that cannot simply be recreated.
That gives the album an almost documentary quality. We are not merely hearing what Lucas and Ligeti composed. We are hearing what happened when they listened to one another.
Beyond genre
It would be easy to attach a long list of labels to Omnidirectional: free jazz, avant-garde, psychedelic rock, experimental music, improvisation, space rock, electronic music. The album certainly touches all of these territories. Cuneiform itself describes the release through a similarly wide constellation of adventurous styles. But the most interesting thing about Omnidirectional is what happens after the labels have been exhausted. The music remains. And it remains difficult to categorize because its real subject is freedom.
Gary Lucas and Lukas Ligeti have created a record in which the destination is deliberately unknown. They begin somewhere, listen, react, push forward, turn sideways, accelerate, withdraw, collide and begin again. The title says everything. The music can move in every direction.
A meeting of two restless musical minds
Omnidirectional is ultimately a meeting between two musicians who have spent their careers resisting musical borders. Gary Lucas brings the raw expressive force of the electric guitar, the memory of blues and rock, the imagination of the avant-garde and the instincts of a songwriter and composer.
Lukas Ligeti brings a percussion language shaped by contemporary composition, African rhythmic ideas, experimental jazz, electronics and years of intercultural musical exploration. Together they create something that belongs completely to neither musician alone. It belongs to the moment.
That is why Omnidirectional feels less like a conventional album and more like a journey through a constantly changing sonic universe. The music does not tell us where to go. It simply keeps opening new doors. Sometimes behind those doors there is melody. Sometimes rhythm. Sometimes noise. Sometimes silence. Sometimes something that sounds like all four at once. And somewhere in that endless movement, Lucas’s guitar and Ligeti’s percussion meet again—two voices circling one another, challenging one another, discovering one another.
The journey has no single direction. It is, in every sense, Omnidirectional.
By Daniella Bushler
