Poor Isa is a Belgian duo of guitarists Ruben Machtelinckx (who is also the founder of the Aspen Edities label) and Frederik Leroux, who focus in this duo on prepared banjos and woodblocks, employing unconventional extended techniques – bowing, muting, tapping – and expand their instruments’ sonic palettes into something wholly unfamiliar. Both Machtelinckx and Leroux are genre-agnostic and are known for their refined work in the margins of minimalist, acoustic improvisation, but with maximalist attention to detail. They transform traditional roles reminiscent of early music into emotionally translucent yet pure sonic exploration.
Poor Isa’s first albums – Let’s Drink the Sea and Dance and Dissolution of the Other (Edities Aspen, 2019 and 2023) marked this duo as having a distinctive, poetic voice in the European avant-garde music. Poor Isa’s third album departs from the
