Activities is Anna Butterss's debut LP. The Australian bassist living in the United States has made her bread playing with some truly notable personalities in the worlds of indie rock and jazz (most notably, Aimee Mann and Makaya McCraven, but others you'd probably recognize as well), but has somehow managed to skirt around the subject of a solo release for almost a decade. It appears to be sheer happenstance, that while tinkering in the studio with Colorfield Records runner Pete Min, she determined to make a change. Something she was doing that day opened up the possibility to her that she could make a record that she'd be proud to put her name on. I don't know what tipped the scales, but whichever muse put their thumb on the pan is owed our thanks. Activities is an eclectic record with a clear sense of purpose but no conclusive limitations on its definite form. Its essence is stable while everything around it rotates and recombines into novel and fascinating constellations, while each song makes best use of Anna's gifts to convey its message without needing to invade the territory of its siblings. This structure might not seem particularly important to point out, but the fact that Anna allows each track enough elbow room to unpack itself as undisturbed kin means that you're going to be encountering several, discrete phenotypes of her genius, all blossoming independently off of the same stalk-like multiform flora in a dazzling spectacle of ingenuity. This dedication to cultivating the aesthetic potential of her flourishing vision allows for a steady Universal Beings-esque intangible voyage like "Entrance" to be followed by the kosmische wired, neon-irsed anomaly "Super Lucrative," and then transition into the patiently interpretive and cooing beckoning sway of "Doo Wop" without the album losing its balance to the centrifuge of its competing gravitational pillars. Just as fascinating as these prior examples, a track like "Number One" will draw a ley line between wavering chamber pop futuristics and apertures of Mid Century jazz exhibitions above a microsegmented percussion line that rolls with momentum in rapid succession like the legs of a cybernetic centipede, while later, elevated compositions like "Blevins" can be found coasting along the perimeter of the Earth's atmosphere, high on pure rich oxygen and mesmerized by the miracle of the cosmos, and yet, it is no inconvenience when "Do Not Disturb" lassos you back from Elysium with shifty lines of intrigue infused hard-bop bass. Activities is an album of many diverting paths, none of which are wanting for content, proper orientation, or ultimate destination.
