Interesting monikers are something you are going to run into quite often lately, and vocal artist Leslie Lowder has one for you – idiiom. With her latest album Neural Network, Lowder establishes herself as one of the more intriguing vocalists, starting with Laurie Anderson back in the eighties up to more current vocal experimentalists like Juliana Barwick.
And Lowder picks up a double-edged sword here, as all of the five tracks are improvisations, with Lowder manipulating her vocals with electronics to create a unique effect with each. The double edge here is that such experiments can often be quite risky, with no middle ground, and Lowder doubles the risk here by having no other instrumentation added – they could fail completely and come out to be quite mesmerising. Idiiom creates a sort of idiom here, giving each of her vocal improvisations that peculiarity that creates a linguistic, in this case, vocal idiom.
It might seem like a hermetic closed system that is created here, but luckily for Lowder and anybody who ventures into her improvs when you are able to find the way into this system, it is that mesmerising effect that wins you over, making this one of the more interesting releases at the start of 2026.
