Big Thief’s James Krivchenia & Bassist Sam Wilkes Are ‘Probably Wizards’ On New Single

Big Thief drummer/producer James Krivchenia shared a new single, “Probably Wizards,” featuring bassist Sam Wilkes. The track is the first preview of Krivchenia’s newly announced album, Performing Belief, arriving on May 2 via Planet Mu.

Performing Belief is the follow-up to James Krivchenia’s 2022 LP, Blood Karaoke. The new record sees James working with Wilkes (Sam Gendel, KNOWER) and double bassist/multi-instrumentalist Joshua Abrams (Natural Information Society).

While Blood Karaoke saw Krivchenia mining the internet to create the album with hundreds of tiny samples of unwatched YouTube videos, the fabric of Performing Belief is woven from sound of the natural world. Press materials elaborated on the record:

For years, Krivchenia would record his musical encounters with natural objects: performing on a particularly resonant log on a hike, throwing rocks into a pristine pond, tap dancing in the mud. This archive of sounds became the fertile soil out of which the tracks on Performing Belief grew. Having built these rhythmic nests, Wilkes and Abrams bring the presence of a grounding human witness to the undergrowth, providing a centering and even at times melodic voice to the gathering. This rhythmic language, set in Krivchenia’s long-fermenting electronic musical palate, feels like a revelation — it calls back not only to his wonderfully elastic timekeeping behind the kit, but also to his prior work in computer music as well as his deep study of the vast human archive of drumming.

Lead single “Probably Wizards” is a collaboration with Sam Wilkes and “carries a profoundly fresh sense of time blurring the edges of the quantized grid and the boundaries of electronic music.”

Listen to “Probably Wizards” below:

James Krivchenia will perform his first-ever live solo show at Brooklyn’s Elsewhere on June 17. Find show info below.

Performing Belief Tracklist:

1. Undesigned
2. Judge The Seeds (with Sam Wilkes & Joshua Abrams)
3. Probably Wizards (with Sam Wilkes)
4. Sympathetic Magic (with Sam Wilkes & Joshua Abrams)
5. Bracelets For Unicorns (with Sam Wilkes & Joshua Abrams)
6. Filling In The Swamp (with Sam Wilkes & Joshua Abrams)
7. The Wounded Place (with Sam Wilkes)
8. Metaphoric Leakage (with Sam Wilkes)