# New CD – 2026: Lucas & Lukas – Omnidirectional: Review, Video, CD cover

- Link: https://jazzblues.eu/2026/09/29/new-cd-2026-lucas-lukas-omnidirectional-review-video-cd-cover/
- Published: 2026-09-29T05:00:23+01:00
- Author: https://JazzBlues.EU

**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**

[**Buy from here – New CD**](https://cuneiformrecords.bandcamp.com/album/omnidirectional)

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